Kyle Whittingam Reveals What Michigan's Trademark will be in 2026

Michigan kicked spring ball off on Tuesday and the Kyle Whittingham era is officially underway. The Wolverines are figuring out a new offensive and defense scheme in Ann Arbor for the 2026 season after Whittingham hired Jason Beck and Jay Hill to coordinate his offense and defense.

On Tuesday, Whittingham met with the media and the key is going to be the players learning the new schemes, he also said Michigan's trademark is going to be physicality moving forward. The former Utah coach wants the Wolverines to be a physical challenge for any team they play.

"That’s a good question, what the strengths are," said Whittingham. "We’re going to find that out this spring. We have a decent idea, and we won’t really get a lot of feedback the first couple days, no pads. You can’t get into pads until the third day, and so that will be a work in progress. But we think that we’re going to be a physical football team.

"We want that to be our trademark. We want to be mentally and physically tough. And when you come to play us, you know you’ve been in for a physical contest. But we’re just looking forward to seeing how these things develop over the next 15 practices. We’ve got a lot ahead of us as far as what we’ve got to get accomplished. We’ve got to figure out the talent level of the players, the scheme. We have to learn scheme. They have to learn scheme and be able to assimilate that. And so there’s a lot of things we’re going to find out this spring that are going to be key moving forward, obviously."

So how hard will it be to learn the scheme?

Previously, Jay Hill said he has one of the more complicated schemes to learn and it would take spring and fall camp for his team to fully learn it. However, Whittingham said a big reason he hired Jason Beck to run the offense was because of his ability to simplify things.

With so much turnover in college football in this day and age, being able to plug and play is crucial — so being able to quickly pick things up is a key.

"Well, three or four years ago, we made a concerted effort at Utah to simplify," the first-year Michigan coach said. "With the portal and the roster turnover and all you have, 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. And so I don’t want to say we dummied things down, but we simplified things. And Jason Beck, we brought him in last year, and one of the main reasons we brought him in was that his scheme was very user-friendly, and the learning curve is not steep. It’s very effective, but the learning curve is not steep.

"And defensively, we modified things and made that simpler, more simplistic as well. And so that is a big part of football today at the collegiate level is making sure that you’ve got a system that’s essentially plug and play because you’re going to get a guy. Some of our guys won’t get here until summer, and we’re counting on them playing this fall, and we’ve got to be able to get them up to speed rather quickly, very quickly."