A few days ago, Utah football head coach Kyle Whittingham made some newsworthy remarks in a conversation with Utah-based radio host and podcaster Spence Checketts.
Whittingham was discussing the future of the BYU-Utah football rivalry, but what he said about that game also flowed into the larger discussion of college sports conference realignment.
It’s a much longer conversation, so you will want to listen to the full show to get the complete context. That said, this one paragraph is impossible to ignore. It reasonably caused a stir:
“Well, first of all, you use the word permanently, and I can say it’s far from that,” Whittingham said. “I think in two-to-three, maybe five years at the outside, everything is gonna change again. And so this may be just a quick couple years of the game (BYU-Utah) returning, and then everything is blown up again and people go their separate ways.”
Since BYU-Utah will be a conference game in the Big 12, people will obviously wonder what Whittingham thinks about the structure of conference realignment in several years. It is reasonable to think that a lot of changes (Florida State and Clemson to the SEC, for example) will occur. How far these changes spread is obviously something we’ll all wonder about.
Let’s gather some reactions to Whittingham’s comments and then make a few extra points at the very end:
