Glad the state of Utah could help fix Michigan football.
The sacrifice, however, proved heavy.
The coaching carnage left in the wake of fired Michigan head coach Sherrone Moore has just about run its course at the University of Utah and BYU after Kyle Whittingham loaded up his friends and left for Ann Arbor.
The domino effect has spread from Logan through Salt Lake City to Provo. There might still be some more coming down the pike.
It’s amazing what can result from one guy making wrong choices.
Utah took the brunt of it, losing offensive coordinator Jason Beck, QBs coach Koy Detmer Jr., receivers coach Micah Simon, tight ends coach and recruiting coordinator Freddie Whittingham, offensive line coach Jim Harding and defensive ends coach Lewis Powell.
This wasn’t just pillaging a staff, it was a vacuuming of the Ute football offices, a rearranging of chairs at BYU and Utah State.
BYU lost defensive coordinator and assistant head coach Jay Hill, who in turn took longtime Cougar cornerbacks coach, pass defense coordinator and recruiter Jernaro Gilford with him.
Also on Saturday, Utah’s freshly minted Whittingham replacement Morgan Scalley named Utah State offensive coordinator Kevin McGiven his new OC. He’s a good one.
Moore stumbles, Whittingham and Utah part ways, and he lands a dream job at Michigan.
All of this kind of stings, but this is football circa 2026. It’s also part of the profession. When a guy gets a head coaching job, he looks to hire loyalists who know his system. It saves time.
In the case of Whittingham, he’s stepping into a league and community that is steeped in passionate sports activists. At Michigan, like at Penn State, LSU and others, you can win nine or 10 games and even win a national championship, but a losing season goes down like a pasture patty.
Whittingham is in dire need of assistants that have his back and will protect him. He needs cover, and at Michigan, he’s going to need all he can get. Now he has his brother Freddie and son Alex, fresh from the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs.
And the others are his very best buds.
His back was never covered that well by Under Armour.
His replacement, Morgan Scalley, is left to pick up the pieces in Salt Lake City. It will be tough to replace those who left, but he’ll survive and go find his own posse.
Now Bronco Mendenhall, hunting a replacement for McGiven at Utah State, got Robert Anae out of retirement. Anae’s son Famika posted on X: “There goes the babysitter.”
BYU will likely elevate special teams coordinator and defensive end coach Kelly Poppinga to defensive coordinator. He held a co-coordinator position for Mendenhall at Virginia.
As of Sunday night, BYU had two coaching vacancies for head coach Kalani Sitake to fill.
Thanks, Sherrone Moore.
The good news is that even with Hill’s defection, there are two BYU staff members with a comprehensive understanding of Hill’s defense — head coach Sitake and consultant Gary Andersen, the former head coach at Oregon State, Wisconsin, Utah State and Southern Utah.
A third brainiac of that defense, aside from the departed Gilford, is Hill’s safeties assistant Gavin Fowler, who reportedly will be Weber State’s defensive coordinator.
Can BYU get Fowler back?
Perhaps the biggest BYU coaching news of the week broke on 1280 The Zone radio late this week when Andersen declared he was going nowhere. He’s locked in with Sitake and BYU.
Andersen is a coach/player whisperer.
That Andersen is staying in his consultancy at BYU is a huge factor for adjustment days to come in Provo.
He says he wants to be a consultant, not a full-time coach or administrator. He wants to teach coaches and kids and be the best grandpa he can be right now.
Andersen trained Sitake, Hill, Roderick, BYU D-line coach Sione Po’uha, Scalley, Baylor coach Dave Aranda, (Baylor) Matt Wells (USU, Texas Tech), Steve Clark (Utah, BYU, Utah Tech, SUU), Brent Brennan (San Jose State) and Frank Maile (USU, Boise State), to name a few.
Andersen said what matters to him is the university he’s at, one doing it the right way.
“I have no desire to be involved with the administration that’s in it for themselves or doesn’t take care of the kids. And BYU does a great job. There’s no perfect school in the world, but BYU does a tremendous job of just putting the student-athletes first and putting the kids in a position to be successful way past football when they walk out of BYU,” Andersen told the radio audience.
Andersen’s remarks came at a timely moment in Provo because, through all the Hill haze and rumors of OC Roderick possibly going to Utah, this was the only voice explaining things in Provo.
“It’s a great spot for me and I’m excited to be here.”
Andersen said he is dedicated to helping Kalani “grow and sustain” in his role as a head coach and “go through this transition with Jay.”
“Jay had a great opportunity and he went off for that opportunity. I think we all support him and are very happy for him and happy for Kyle and everybody involved. But now you look back and we have a very, very sound foundation defensively.
“And the way we’ve grown over the last two or three years and built the scheme, those guys have been in the room with us. We’ve grown from a four-down front to a three-down front and we’re doing a lot of what I did with Kalani at Oregon State and Dave Aranda (Utah State) for all those years.
“We’ve mixed the core of all of us together. I think its a special group. There are a lot of guys who have called a lot of defensive plays in that room. We’re going to be in a great spot. We’ll be done real quick and we’ll start the ball rolling and get a guy ready to get out there and knock the socks off it when he calls plays for next year.”
Change is tough.
But everything changes everywhere all the time in this beloved game.
Michigan football is due for a change, a long overdue change.
The storylines with Utah, BYU and USU will be interesting to dissect in these parts.
We can argue all day long the fairness, the utility of these coaches and what good surfaces in the post-Moore mess-up debate drama.
But it still boils down to recruiting. As they say, “Sometimes it’s not about the Xs and the Os but the Jimmys and the Joes.”
From this day forward among all the fallout from the Sherrone Moore mess, it’s about recruiting for these Utah schools.
It’s salesmanship, player retention, transfer portal, NIL deals and closing sales.
In the end, it all comes down to a talent harvest.
