Where does Michigan go from here? The Michigan Wolverines are a mess, and the strangest part isn’t quarterback Bryce Underwood trending toward one of the biggest recruiting busts of all time. We’ll get to Underwood. The real shock is what’s happening with Michigan head coach Kyle Whittingham, a man almost everyone in college football viewed as a top-10 coach the day he was hired.

The entire pitch with Whittingham was short-term. Nobody thought he was going to be in Ann Arbor for a decade. He was supposed to be there for a couple of years, steady the ship, and win football games. I vividly remember the reaction to the hire. People called it a good one, and the logic went like this: nobody knew what Michigan would look like in five years, but Whittingham was going to win them some games right away.

That hasn’t happened. Not even close.

The coaching is the whole problem for the Michigan Wolverines

I don’t know if Whittingham has checked out. I don’t know if he was ready to retire and somebody offered him a bag, so he took the job. What I do know is what I see on the field, and this team looks like some of the worst coaching I have ever seen.

Read that again, because of who it’s about. Whittingham built a reputation as one of the most respected coaches in the sport, and now Michigan looks unprepared, undisciplined, and lost. That’s brutal.

Now I want to be clear. One season shouldn’t erase an entire career’s worth of work. But Michigan didn’t hire Whittingham for his career. It hired him for right now, and right now is exactly where this is falling apart.

Bryce Underwood should be benched

And of course, you can’t talk about this Michigan team without talking about Underwood.

And you may say, Tegan, you were one of the people with crazy takes about Underwood in the preseason. You’re right. I’ll own that, and I’ll admit I was wrong. I saw flashes on tape, and logically I thought he was going to take a step forward and get better. That’s what young quarterbacks with his kind of talent usually do.

Instead, he put out quote after quote about how good he is rather than working on his craft and getting better. And frankly, that’s the part that bothers me most. Talent was never the question with Underwood. The work was.

Frankly, he should be benched.

As for the rest of his career, I don’t know where he goes from here. My guess is he transfers to a different school. But the location won’t fix anything on its own. If Underwood doesn’t change his attitude and the way he goes about his business, he will be one of the biggest recruiting busts we have ever seen. And for a player who arrived with as much hype as he did, that would be a hell of a fall.

Michigan has to make the unthinkable call

So where does that leave Whittingham?

I think Michigan should fire him after one season. I fully understand how crazy that sounds. Michigan doesn’t fire coaches after one year. Programs like this are supposed to be patient, give a guy time to recruit his own players, and let a staff settle in.

But understand the expectations this hire came with. The Whittingham era was never built on patience. It was supposed to produce immediate results, and the Wolverines aren’t getting them. When the entire justification for a hire is that it will win right away, and it doesn’t, there is nothing left to wait for.

Say what you want about firing a coach this quickly, but keeping Whittingham means Michigan pays for a short-term plan that already failed while losing another year it could spend building something real. I’m not stamping this at 110 percent because the money and the optics make it messy. But I’m confident in where I land.

Michigan should move on from Kyle Whittingham, and the sooner the Wolverines admit this experiment didn’t work, the sooner they can stop wasting time.