Kyle Whittingham hire: How new Michigan coach can be both upgrade, 'bridge'

Michigan’s more than two-week coaching search is nearing its end as the Wolverines finalize a deal to hire former Utah coach Kyle Whittingham. He will replace Sherrone Moore, who was fired for cause earlier this month.

For Michigan, getting Whittingham – the winningest coach in Utah history – feels significant after a coaching search which took multiple turns. To Josh Pate, it also feels like a “bridge” hire, though he said it’s still an upgrade for the Wolverines.

At age 66, there were questions about whether Whittingham could retire after he stepped down as Utah coach. But he made it clear that was not the case and he wanted to continue coaching. As a result, there are questions about how much longer he can be on the sidelines.

As a result, Pate said Whittingham’s hire brings high upside in the short term, at least. However, it could work out in the “mid-term” as he signs a five-year deal.

“You cannot be irate when you upgrade your situation,” Pate said. “I still think Kyle Whittingham, until someone convinces me otherwise, seems like a bridge coach, to me. Doesn’t seem like the long-term solution to any kind of problem you have up there. But there are two ways to look at this, because I could be wrong about that. … The first way is that this is a long-term solution – let’s call it a mid-term solution, so the next five years. That’s one way to think about it.

“The other way to think about it is, it’s nothing more than a bridge candidate 2.0. I told you, I thought Sherrone was a bridge head coach. I never thought the long-term prospectus up there included Sherrone Moore as the head coach. You ask multiple people, sort of influential people around the program, ‘Hey, look down the road five years. Who’s your head coach?’ None of them really ever said Sherrone. And that was before any of this popped up.”

How coaching search ‘shook Michigan tree’

When Michigan last underwent a coaching change in 2024, Jim Harbaugh left for the Los Angeles Chargers. He returned to Ann Arbor in 2015, and the timing of his departure meant the Wolverines looked internally and ultimately promoted Sherrone Moore from offensive coordinator.

That means Michigan had not gone through a full coaching search in roughly a decade. To Josh Pate, that presented an opportunity to answer some key questions inside the building. In a sense, it was as if the “tree” got shaken, which Pate said is one of the outcomes of a national search.

“One of the benefits of this coaching search, even if it ended the way you didn’t want it to with Kyle Whittingham being the head coach there, is it shook the Michigan tree,” Pate said. “Because we have not had a real, old-fashioned, traditional coaching search at Michigan in quite a while. I’d call it a generation. You’ve promoted from within, and that was on the back end of Harbaugh, and Harbaugh was hired over 10 years ago. You haven’t had a coaching search in a while. The reason it’s important to have one is it shakes the tree. It shakes the Michigan tree and you find out which branches are solid, which ones are dead? Whose opinion can you value and whose can you not value? Which lips are sealed and which are really, really loose and running their mouth all over the place?

“You’ve got to find a lot of that out. You’ve got to do a healthy inventory of your process, you’ve got to find out how discombobulated it is over here or maybe how air tight it is over there. This stuff’s important. If I had to guess, it’s important because you may have another coaching search in the not-too-distant future and that one needs to be a well-oiled machine. This one was not. I don’t think anyone in Michigan circles would argue with that.”

Kyle Whittingham hire could help UM ‘regroup’

If Kyle Whittingham ends up being a “bridge” coach, Josh Pate said it could come down to the timing. Michigan reportedly had Alabama’s Kalen DeBoer and Arizona State’s Kenny Dillingham high on its list, but neither left their respective programs.

With those two names off the board, Pate wondered if Michigan could opt for short-term success as the school deals with not only the Sherrone Moore situation, but another investigation of the athletics department.

“It could just be that he’s nothing more than a bridge candidate,” Pate said. “It could be, you could easily sell me on this, the powers that be looked around and said, ‘We didn’t get our A candidate or our B candidate. Everyone past that, we’re going to have to reconvene on and if we get all the way down to guys like Whittingham, let’s just consider him a 1-2 year solution. We can regroup, we can get president and AD figured out. We can get this investigation internally figured out. Then, maybe eight months from now or maybe 18 months from now or maybe 24 months from now, we’ll be in a better position to go hire a long-term head coach.’

“That could absolutely be their thinking, which was the Sherrone situation. Even then, you upgraded. If you’re still in a bridge candidate period, but the coach you have now is better than the one you had yesterday, you still upgrade. So, at least, there’s that.”