Michigan is reportedly adding an experienced hand to the support side of Kyle Whittingham's program.
Per 247Sports, the Wolverines are expected to hire Monique Felix as their Director of Football Experience & Engagement, a role built around everything that shapes a player's life away from the field.
The job description tells you where Whittingham and his staff are focusing some of their energy. Felix will oversee the full student-athlete experience off the field, from the moment a player is onboarded into the program all the way through graduation. That covers a lot of ground in the current landscape, where holding a roster together and helping guys navigate life inside a program has become just as much a part of the operation as anything that happens between the lines.
For coaches who have watched these support staffs balloon over the last few years, this is a familiar and important piece of the puzzle. The programs that do it well tend to keep their players engaged, keep them accountable, and keep them in the building. Felix has spent her career on exactly that side of the house.
She comes to Ann Arbor from Wisconsin, where she had been since early 2023. Felix joined the Badgers as Director of Football Student Services before moving into the Director of Football Administration role. In Madison, her plate included managing players transitioning into and out of the program, evaluating the academic profiles of prospective recruits, building out programming for player development, serving as a liaison across the program's support units, and helping coordinate team travel logistics. If you have worked in football operations, you know that is a long list, and most of it happens without much public credit.
Before Wisconsin, Felix spent better than two years at Baylor as Associate Director of Football Operations. There, she worked on player accountability and academic achievement, leaning on data and close collaboration with the coaching staff to move the needle.
Her background fits the profile. A Sheboygan, Wisconsin native, Felix earned her bachelor's in business administration from Marquette in 2019 and followed it with a master's of education in sport management from Minnesota in 2020, where she excelled in track.
Felix is the latest addition to a support staff Kyle Whittingham has been building out steadily since arriving in Ann Arbor late last December. Just a few days ago, we shared the addition of Jax Eagan from the Eastern Kentucky (FCS) staff. That came as the department also saw some churn, with assistant director of personnel John Collins leaving for the Detroit Lions. Earlier in the offseason, Whittingham brought over Natalia Benitez-Hilton from Utah as Director of Football Operations and named Alayna Williamson, his chief of staff at Utah, to the same role at Michigan, while moving former Wolverines safeties coach and receivers coach Ron Bellamy to director of player personnel and Skylar Phan, formerly USC's director of recruiting strategy, to the front office.
The title may be new to a lot of folks, but the work is not. Michigan is betting that Felix's track record of managing the details of the player experience translates to a program operating at the top of the sport.
Stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.