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- Utah football faces a pivotal 21-day period as the transfer portal opens, impacting future roster construction.
- Head coach Kyle Whittingham emphasizes the urgent need to hire an offensive coordinator, involving defensive coordinator Morgan Scalley in the process.
- Utah aims to simplify offensive schemes for quick player adaptation, reflecting changes in college athletics dynamics.
SALT LAKE CITY — The next 21 days will prove to be pivotal for the future of the Utah football program, and none of it will have to do with what the team does on the field.
On Dec. 9, the college football transfer portal window open up, allowing players from across the country to seek greener pastures. Like almost every program in the country, Utah will not be alone in losing players to the transfer portal or bringing in new players to construct a 2025 roster.
It's the new normal in college athletics as December turns into a de facto free agency period in the sport.
"It's going to be a heavy shopping season for us in the portal," Utah head coach Kyle Whittingham said Monday as part of his weekly press conference.
But complicating the matters is that Utah is without an offensive coordinator, or at least one in the official capacity and not on an interim basis. Former offensive analyst Mike Bajakian took over as interim offensive coordinator in October, but he hasn't been given the official title.
That coaching hire proves to be one of the biggest factors in players on the offense — in the transfer portal or through the high school ranks — wanting to commit to Utah. It's why Utah has already started the process to hire an offensive coordinator, with the hope to have someone in place before the portal window opens.
"That's going on right now," Whittingham said. "Evaluating what we're doing, what attractive candidates outside the program, and evaluating everything right now and getting the short list ready. But, yeah, that'll be job one as soon as the timing is right to get that filled. Recruits want to know who the coordinator is going to be and that's something that we will need to have solved sooner rather than later."
But it's a hire process that Whittingham won't do alone.
The longtime coach who will soon wrap up his 20th season as the head coach at Utah has given defensive coordinator Morgan Scalley a say in the process.
"Very involved," Whittingham said of Scalley being involved in the hiring of a new OC. "Yup, very involved. And it would be an injustice if he wasn't. And so, given our situation, he's working side by side with me."
Last December, Scalley was named the head coach in waiting, with the expectation that Whittingham would soon retire — though Whittingham hasn't officially said when that will be.
The hiring of an offensive coordinator is just one part of Scalley learning the day-to-day operations of being a head coach for Utah, a process that has been ramping up the last few years as Whittingham continues to bring Scalley in on different aspect of the job.
Regardless of who will be the head coach going into next season, Whittingham said the offensive coordinator (and by extension the defensive coordinator) needs to have a system that makes it easy for incoming players to learn it quickly.
Long are the days where players commit to Utah out of high school and marinate and mature through a more complicated scheme before excelling in their upperclass years. In the era of the transfer portal and massive roster turnover, the systems have to be easier to learn — a lesson Utah learned this season, especially, on offense.
That change goes counter to what has been a strong formula of success for Utah under Kyle Whittingham, but it's one that has to change, he said.
"With the turnover and with the way the portal is now, that system is — I don't want to say it's a dinosaur — but it is very hard to continue to have it work," Whittingham said. "And that also plays into, you've got to take a hard look at your schemes, because your schemes better be plug and play. You can't have a scheme that's so complicated and so in depth that it takes a guy two or three years to learn it, because you don't have that time anymore.
"That's another conversation we're having, another facet of what we're doing that needs to be streamlined," he added. "You collect all the talent you can in the offseason and just hope it gels and has chemistry, and they better be able to assimilate the offense and the defensive schemes in that short period of time in order to function. And so that's something that we're looking at hard and making sure we get corrected."
No pressure on the new hire.
But change in an ever-evolving sport is a guarantee, and the teams that have been able to figure that out quicker have been the most successful, Whittingham said. It's why a team like Colorado and what Deion Sanders has done, especially with the transfer portal, has been effective two years into his time in Boulder.
Whether Whittingham continues on as the team's head coach, or whether the transition to Scalley is imminent, Utah football is at a crossroads in how it moves forward, and the hiring of an offensive coordinator is just the beginning to what should be and offseason of change.
