Kyle Whittingham sent a lot of people into a blind fury in his Big Ten media days debut on Thursday, by admitting he himself doesn't fly into a blind fury at the sight of scarlet and gray.
“I just think a rivalry can be intense and emotional without the hatred factor. I don’t think there’s any place for that personally,” Whittingham said.
And it's not as if Whittingham doesn't have experience living inside an all-encompassing, 365-day-a-year rivalry. In 2024, officials at BYU and Utah jointly launched a campaign to take the heat down in the Holy War; it worked so well that, that same year, Utah's AD took the mic in Whittingham's post-game press conference to say BYU's 22-21 win in Salt Lake City was "absolutely stolen from us." Last year, a BYU fan was arrested for threatening to shoot any Utah fan on sight.
However, Whittingham's perspective on rivalries is shaped by his experience. Namely, the fact that he's lived on both sides of it, and he's far from the only coach to wear both red and blue. Whittingham played and GA'd at BYU in the late 1970s and early-to-mid 1980s, then coached at Utah for 32 straight seasons. (His personal Holy War record: 23-11.) BYU head coach Kalani Sitake also played and GA'd at BYU, but he was also Whittingham's right-hand man at Utah for a decade; Whittingham hired him to coach linebackers upon inheriting the head job from Urban Meyer in 2005, then promoted him to defensive coordinator and later assistant head coach.
BYU and Utah coaches are the most likely to sit down and share beers -- err, carbonated beverages -- with their rivals than any in college football. That's not to say Whittingham is eager to share a drink with his new counterpart in Ryan Day, but if he did, he wouldn't feel a temptation to douse it in iocane powder.
“I think Ryan Day is a good person. To sit here and say I hate Ryan Day, I’d be making crap up because that’s not true.”
Whittingham's answer -- and the reaction therein -- is emblematic of the backwards reasoning we use to judge how coaches approach rivalry games. If you win, you treat the game with the right amount of importance. If you lose, you don't.
If you treat the game -- THE Game, in this game -- as life and death and lose? "Well, it's clearly because your guys came out tight and too afraid to make a mistake. The other guys won because they came out loose and treat it like just another game."
If you treat the game like it's one of 12 and lose? "Well, it's clearly because Coach doesn't understand what this rivalry means to the players and fans. The other guy does, and it shows."
Last November, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer ran a story titled, "The 365-day war: Inside Urban Meyer's all-consuming obsession with beating Michigan."
“I grew up in the 10-year war. I lived this rivalry even when I wasn’t coaching it,” Meyer was quoted as saying. “Did I take it to the extreme? I probably did. But there was a guy that coached for 28 years named Woody Hayes that took it pretty serious.”
Meyer went 7-0 against Michigan as Ohio State's head coach, and before that he went 5-1 vs. Florida State and 5-1 vs. Georgia while at Florida, 2-0 vs. BYU at Utah, and 3-1 against Kent State and Toledo in his two seasons at Bowling Green. His 22-3 rivalry game record is absolutely impeccable. Clearly, Urban's .880 rivalry game winning percentage was because of his "all-consuming obsession" with beating Michigan, and Florida State, and Georgia, and so on and so forth. Right? Or was it because Meyer happens to be one of the greatest coaches in college football history and his teams were better than their rivals -- and almost everyone else they played? Meyer carried an .854 winning percentage in all games, and .838 in conference games (including an insane 54-4 mark in regular season Big Ten games.)
Did Urban go undefeated against Michigan because he was psychotically obsessed with beating the Wolverines, or did he go undefeated because Ohio State was just the better team? Little of both, right? Urban was an all-time great because he was psychotically obsessed about everything, his .854 winning percentage, three national championships, and six conference championships go hand-in-hand with the health issues that drove him out of the game at 45, again at 46, and then again 54.
It's no coincidence that Plain-Dealer article came out when it did. Nov. 26 was the Wednesday before The Game. Ryan Day carried an unthinkable and unforgivable 4-game losing streak into the 2025 matchup. He not only inherited Meyer's 7-Game winning streak, but before Urban, Jim Tressel introduced himself to Buckeye Nation in 2000 by looking forward to the Michigan game the following November -- Michigan was on a 10-2-1 run at the time -- delivered an upset victory in November 2001, and then went 8-1 thereafter.
Up through Ohio State's 2024 loss, Day placed the same life-and-death importance on The Game as his predecessor. Literally. Days before the 2024 tilt, Day called Ohio State's 3-Game losing streak the most difficult thing he'd personally endured aside from when his father took his own life when Day was eight years old. I'm not making that up. "We can never have that happen again. Ever," Day said. Of course, the 2nd-ranked Buckeyes went out and lost, at home, to an unranked Michigan squad as 20-point favorites. In any other era, it would've effectively ended Ohio State's season, and quite possibly the Ryan Day tenure in Columbus. Instead, Ohio State went out and won the national title.
In the days following Ohio State's 2024 loss, AD Ross Bjork said "I think we maybe need to approach things a little bit differently." . Lo and behold, Ohio State went to Ann Arbor last November and delivered a 27-9 whooping in the Big House. Voila, right? Did Ohio State win because of its changed mindset, or did Ohio State win because they were a much more talented and better coached squad than a Michigan team playing a true freshman quarterback with some, uh, chaos happening behind the scenes?
Again, it's a little of both, right? It would be impossible to argue Ohio State itself did not significantly contribute to Michigan's stunning 2024 win over Ohio State, and so it stands to reason that the Buckeyes were not their own worst enemies in Ann Arbor last November.
So, what's the right approach for Whittingham and Michigan? Ultimately, it's the one that produces more points than the other team at Ohio Stadium on Nov. 28. Whittingham could dress his players in pink hula skirts, and Michigan fans would be fine with it if he delivers a victory. He could do three straight hours of full-contact tackling against a scout team running Ohio State's schemes daily from January to August, and it would be the wrong approach if Ohio State comes out on top.
Ultimately, the team that plays better -- which is usually, but not always, the better team -- on the last Saturday in November, and the coach who wins will be retroactively validated in his approach.
But let's be honest. If Ohio State does beat Michigan a second straight time, Michigan fans will expect Whittingham to jack up the temperature heading into 2027.