Kyle Whittingham wants college football to be like the NFL

The expectation in Ann Arbor for much of the calendar year was that Michigan football would have Kyle Whittingham leading the charge, Dusty May would continue on leading defending national champion Michigan basketball, and Warde Manuel would oversee all of it as the athletic director. However, a lot can change in just over a month’s time.

Whittingham is still the leader of the here, now, and future, but May departed summarily for the NBA, and Manuel is now set to step down at the end of the year. Some place blame on Manuel’s feet for May departing, but the intel suggests that he was tiring of the changes in the college game, and thus jumped ship for the professional level.

On the football side, Whittingham, 66, is molding to the game rather than running from it. He understands why May would want to find a place where he could continue coaching without all of the newfound uncertainty and added responsibilities in the sport, but as for him, he has no intentions of doing anything other than molding himself to the game.

He shared more on The Rich Eisen Show on Monday.

“There is a lot going on in college football, and there’s more to come, I can tell you that,” Whittingham said. “It’s not settled in by any means. But that is a factor, and you’re right. There’s a lot more consistency, stability, whatever the word you want to use at the NBA level or the NFL level. But I love coaching, love working with college athletes, and to me, you’ve got to be able to change with the times. Either you change with the times or you become irrelevant. And so it’s something that I’m embracing, and it’s not going away at least anytime soon.”

At the moment, college sports is a mixture of unfettered free agency and reckless spending. If a program can find a donor, they can lure a player who just signed at one place to come to their school. There isn’t loyalty the way there was when everything was more meticulously enforced by the NCAA before NIL, and the transfer portal became a thing.

Whittingham feels like he has an answer to everything, fixing college football, but he knows that many won’t like it.

“I think it’s got to be an NFL minor league model,” Whittingham said. “We have a salary cap, and the players are employees. I think as distasteful as some of that is, I don’t think there’s any other way that is better than that. And right now it’s out of control. I mean, we’re gonna have probably a dozen teams in the next recruiting cycle with $50 million dollar rosters, and there’s such a disparity between the haves and the have-nots. And I think that the only way to get that evened out and level the playing field is to go ahead and pattern it after an NFL. 

“Like I said, a minor league NFL model and in a super league, if you will, and you’ll probably see 48 to 60 teams survive the cut and be on the right side of the line in the sand and proceed forward.”

Ultimately — and it may be music to Michigan football fans’ ears — Whittingham says that colleges should essentially split from the NCAA to become their own thing, which would look a lot more like the NFL, just bigger.

“If you had a super conference that breaks away and has their own commissioner and runs it, again, just almost a carbon copy of what’s going on in the NFL, then I think you get a chance”

This article originally appeared on Wolverines Wire: Kyle Whittingham wants college football to be like the NFL