Rich: Does Michigan QB Bryce Underwood Deserve to Be on the Hot Seat This Early In His Career?

College football has been professionalized by NIL and the transfer portal, and Rich thinks that changes the patience fans extend to a young quarterback. The attitude now, as he put it: "Hey, you're being paid 11 million bucks a year, kid. It's time for you to start playing."

That is the backdrop for what Kyle Whittingham said about Bryce Underwood at his Labor Day press conference.

"He's our QB right now, and it's not something that's infinite," Whittingham said. "At some point, you know, we've got to turn a corner, and we've got to see improvement, as we do with a bunch of stuff. We got to see improvement out of the coaches."

Whittingham was careful to spread the accountability around. "It's not just on Bryce," he said, and it's not just Bryce's job that isn't set in concrete. "You got to perform week in and week out." His closing line was the kind that coaches mean literally. "What you've done lately is very important in football."

Rich zeroed in on two words. "Right now."

The table agreed that was the headline. Whittingham "right now'd him."

For Rich, that phrasing means time is short, and the schedule does Underwood no favors. Oklahoma is coming in, and Rich called them nasty. He imagines Brent Venables studying the film of Michigan's opener and seeing what everyone else saw. "How Underwood most of the time didn't know where to throw, how, where, what he was doing. That's what it looked like. That's a problem. That's trouble."

Rich didn't soften it for his own fan base. "All of us at Michigan, that was a tough watch. It was a tough watch."

He also said Michigan fans are still learning who Whittingham is, and that the adjustment is real. This is a program used to coaches tearing paint off the walls. Whittingham is calm, cool and collected. "He sounds like he's reading Cat in the Hat to a kindergarten class," Rich said. "And for a lot of Michigan fans, it's like, what gives?"

But Rich isn't reading the calm as softness. Everybody who knows Whittingham says the same thing about him: he has resolve.

"And with this kid quarterback," Rich said, "he might have to."