Kyle Whittingham challenges the reflex to blame players for college football’s latest dysfunction

College football has always been crowded with narratives that make blame feel simple. When the sport looks chaotic, the easiest target is often the people wearing the uniforms, whether it is players accused of bad judgment or programs criticized for on-field results. But in a new opinion piece, Kyle Whittingham pushes back on that instinct, arguing that the deeper causes of the sport’s unraveling belong to the adults, not the athletes.

Whittingham’s focus is the drama orbiting Michigan football over the past handful of seasons, using it as an example of how quickly fans can turn toward the players and away from the surrounding system. The thrust of the argument is not that athletes never make mistakes, but that college football’s current problems are driven by incentives and structures created well beyond the locker room. In his framing, the governing choices made by institutions, administrators, coaches, and compliance leadership shape what players are asked to navigate, and what risks become normalized.

The modern college football ecosystem has placed unique pressure on players, especially as NIL has changed how money and attention flow to athletes. At the same time, coaching scandals, compliance controversies, and inconsistent enforcement have repeatedly shown that the sport’s standards can look negotiable depending on who is involved and how information is managed. Whittingham’s core complaint is that fans and media too often treat those patterns as if they are the players’ fault, rather than the predictable product of adult decision-making.

Michigan becomes a convenient case study because it is both a blue-blood program and a magnet for high expectations, scrutiny, and impatience. In Whittingham’s telling, this combination helps explain why a program’s off-field turbulence can become a recurring distraction, and why the public conversation tends to escalate into moral finger-pointing. The opinion suggests that when a program repeatedly finds itself at the center of controversy, the discussion should widen to include the long chain of responsibility that sits above the roster.

The argument also touches a broader tension in college football: it wants to market itself as a meritocracy built on hard work while simultaneously relying on institutional power. Schools control coaching staffs, academic support structures, compliance departments, and athlete services. They also control how quickly problems are identified and corrected, and how transparently the program addresses shortcomings. Whittingham’s stance is that if the environment repeatedly produces instability, the accountability has to land where the environment was built.

For fans, the most important takeaway is not whether every controversy is identical, but whether the sport learns from its own patterns. If college football continues to respond to dysfunction with narratives that center athletes while minimizing adult responsibility, the incentives that produced the chaos will remain intact. What to watch next is whether public discussion, particularly around programs that attract intense scrutiny like Michigan, shifts from individual blame toward structural questions: what internal controls failed, what enforcement looked like, and how leadership choices either prevented or invited repeat problems.