In a lot of ways, Kenny Dilliingham and Kyle Whittingham are on opposite ends of the head coaches spectrum.
Whittingham, a college head coaching veteran in his first year at Michigan after being brought in to steady the Wolverines program in Ann Arbor after a 21-year run as the head coach at Utah and 32 seasons total as a Ute, has a background on the defensive side of the ball and has won nearly 70% of his games.
Meanwhile, Dillingham is heading into year four as the head coach at Arizona State after carving out a name for himself as one of the game's top offensive minds with stops as a coordinator at Memphis, Auburn, Florida State and Oregon before landing his dream job leading the Sun Devils.
As different as they might seem on paper, the two share at least one thing - a focus on being as efficient as possible.
For Whittingham, that started three or four seasons ago at Utah with the introduction of the transfer portal.
"Well, three or four years ago, we made a concerted effort at Utah to simply - with the portal and roster turnover - you can't have a scheme on either side of the ball that takes a year or two to learn. You don't have that luxury, so I don't want to say that we dummied things down, but we simplified things. [Offensive coordinator] Jason Beck, we brought him in last year, and one of the main reasons we brought him in was his scheme is very user friendly, and the learning curve is not steep and it's very effective."
"Defensively, we modified things, and made things simpler and more simplistic as well, so that is a big part of football today at the collegiate level is making sure you've got system that is pretty much plug and play because some of our guys won't get here until summer, and we're counting on them playing this fall so we've got to be able to get them up to speed very quickly."
Dillingham also mentioned a focus on being more efficient this spring at his presser yesterday bit of a different emphasis than Whittingham provided, but his answer alluded to the same timeline. When asked yesterday how this year is already shaping up to be much different that last year because of the 2025 team's veteran foundation to build on, Dillingham shared that he's challenged his staff to be more efficient in everything they're doing this spring because of the nature of college football's roster turnover.
"Our goal is to be 20% more efficient this spring, by cutting down on some periods and changing up how we've structured some things and try to force ourselves to be more efficient. Do some things in some skelly and team periods to be a little bit different and get the same amount of work done in 20% less time."
After talking about how excited he is to work with this new mix of players, Kenny shared this is the new normal in college football.
"I think that's just the nature of college football now, every three years, you're going to go through 2-3 different teams and different cycles and we're kind of at that cycle."
Hear from both Dillingham and Whittingham on the challenge to be more efficient in the clips.