The college football season is at the start of the offseason, and it was marked by the opening of the transfer portal. The portal just opened despite the postseason still going on, and it's already crowded. Massive NIL deals will mark it, and new Michigan football coach Kyle Whittingham recently said it has been frustrating to deal with them.
In a recent interview with Will Compton and Taylor Lewan on “Bussin' With The Boys,” Whittingham shared that he does not think the current landscape is sustainable. He said he heard that many schools have budgets over $40 million. He also talked about how, because there is now only one portal window instead of two, programs have had to operate differently.
“It’s challenging,” Whittingham said. “How about that word, I’ll use challenging. One thing it’s not is sustainable. Something has got to change. You know the price is going wild. I heard today that a quarterback has received an offer of $5 million for next season. There are plenty of schools with roster budgets of upwards of 40 million dollars.”
One of the most significant issues facing Michigan, compared to other schools, is that Whittingham was hired more recently and had to hit the ground running immediately, given that there is only one transfer portal window now.
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“And one thing here at Michigan that is a little bit challenging for us right now is that until this year, there were two portal windows, which means you had a little safety net after spring ball,” Whittingham said. “You could, for example, our situation stick around for Spring. Get used to the new coaching staff, see how you like them, see how things go, and if you don’t like it, you’ve got an out after spring ball because you could jump in the portal again. Now there’s a one portal system where they feel like they’ve got a gun to their head and they feel like they've got to make a decision right now.”
It remains to be seen how the Michigan football program will do in the transfer portal market, but Whittingham is right that things need to be reined in as we move forward in this new era.
