With Christmas now in the rearview mirror, Warde Manuel and company continue their quest to find the next head coach of the Michigan football program. And by the sounds of it, some real progress has quietly
been made over the last couple days while we were all drinking eggnog and opening presents from Santa.
According to On3’s Chris Balas ($), Manuel is set to meet with administrators at the university on Friday morning to discuss the progress that has been made in the coaching search, and it sounds like that progress has been made with one candidate in particular — former Utah head coach Kyle Whittingham.
Per Balas, multiple sources told him that things are “moving quickly,” and that Whittingham’s agent has had a couple different conversations with several people at the university about the job. Finally, Balas reported that “major donors are on board if it’s a Whittingham hire,” which would greatly help with not only bringing talented players in via the portal, but convincing your current players to stick around and see this thing through.
There have also been recent talk centered around Baltimore Ravens offensive coordinator Todd Monken, but Balas said “we aren’t sure how far that one’s gotten” before following that up with another post saying Monken “seems to be trending away.”
Connecting the dots, it sure seems like Whittingham is trending up in a big way. The 66-year-old considers himself “in the transfer portal” and wants to continue coaching despite stepping down from his longtime role at Utah at the end of the season. Potentially doing so in Ann Arbor seems like a win-win scenario for both him and the university — Whittingham would move up to an elite program, and the program would get a head coach with a squeaky clean track record and decades of success at another Power 4 program.
Stay locked in with Maize n Brew as more information trickles out in the coming hours and days.
