Michigan HC Kyle Whittingham Calls for an NIL Salary Cap in College Football

Kyle Whittingham never said the word retirement, and he still won't say it. That distinction turned out to matter quite a bit.

Michigan's new head coach joined the show at the Champions Circle Golf Classic, wearing the block M and admitting it took a few months to feel normal. Coaches report next week, players midweek, then fall camp, then September 5.

The path here was not accidental. Whittingham told Rich he had a short mental list of jobs he would never turn down. "About half a dozen schools that if the opportunity arose couldn't say no, and this was definitely on that list."

About Utah, he chooses his words carefully. "We'd done just about everything we could there, and we had a nice run. Time for somebody else to be able to have the opportunity to lead the program. So I stepped down. I didn't use the word retirement, and still don't."

When Michigan called, he and his wife had already settled it. "It wasn't like, okay, well, let me think about it and consider it. It was, okay, let's go. I'm in."

He was equally blunt about the money. "In this day and age of college football, it's all about NIL and having the funds to put a roster together, and without an entity like Champions Circle, you got no chance."

Rich asked how many times a player has walked into his office asking to be paid more. "Can't count them." A general manager handles that now, which makes the answer elegantly simple: that office is right next door, go have a conversation.

Given a magic wand, he would rebuild the sport as something familiar. "It's got to be an NFL minor league model where we have a salary cap. The players are employees. As distasteful as some of that is, I don't think there's any other way that is better than that."

He sees a super league of roughly 48 to 60 teams surviving the cut, with its own commissioner. Told that would mean unions and collective bargaining, he did not flinch. "It's part of it."

His reasoning is arithmetic. Private equity is entering the picture, NIL is climbing 20, 30, 40 percent a year, and the gap between the haves and the have nots keeps widening. "It's not sustainable."

On the quarterback room, there was no suspense. "Bryce is our guy," Whittingham said, then said it twice more for good measure. Bryce Underwood had barely turned 18 when he was thrust into the job as a true freshman, and still won nine games. He is 6'4", 230, runs like crazy, and has a big arm.

The detail that lands hardest is that Underwood had no dedicated quarterback coach last season. Whittingham said Michigan essentially inherited a player who was still, in development terms, straight out of high school.

What he inherited on top of that is a worker. "There's nobody that wants to be great more so than Bryce Underwood. He's a workaholic. He's in the film room constantly. He's out on the practice field by himself throwing balls."

Rich pushed for one playbook concession, asking whether Underwood gets to throw on the run more this season. Whittingham gave it up. "We'll move the launch point around and move him out of the pocket. To be throwing on the move as accurately as he does is something that if we didn't implement, that would be stupid."

He is less certain about converting his most famous friendship. Twenty-plus years with Urban Meyer does not undo itself overnight, though there has been progress. "I'm molding him," Whittingham said, admitting a few go blues have slipped out over the past year.