Kyle Whittingham tried to draw a line between rivalry fire and personal dislike, and he did it in front of a crowd that knows exactly how those words can land.
At the 2026 Big Ten Football Media Days in Chicago on Thursday, Whittingham said he understands the size of the game and the emotion around it, but not the idea that coaches should actually hate one another.
“I’ve learned how intense that rivalry is and how important the game is,” Whittingham said. “Hate is a strong word, but I want to win that game as badly as anybody in Ann Arbor. ...
I just think a rivalry can be intense and emotional without the hatred factor. I don’t think there’s any place for that personally.
I think Ryan Day is a good person. To sit here and say I hate Ryan Day, I’d be making crap up because that’s not true.”
The quote was supposed to sound measured. Instead, it immediately opened the door for the obvious question: what rivalry does Whittingham think he’s walking into?
He’s not exactly new to this business of charged matchups. Whittingham spent 32 years with the Utes in various roles, and his background includes the Holy War rivalry with BYU, one of the most heated in the country.
That’s true whether BYU is in the Big 12 or was still an independent. So the idea that “hate” has no place in rivalry talk feels a little off coming from someone with that kind of résumé.
And to be clear, the point here isn’t that coaches truly hate each other in a personal sense. Usually they don’t.
These relationships shift too fast, jobs change too often, and in modern college football you can end up working alongside the same people you were supposed to despise. But there’s a difference between personal hatred and the kind of animosity that fuels a rivalry.
That part comes with the territory.
Ryan Day understands that. He has called for a red “X” to cover the Wolverines’ Maize and Blue “M.”
That’s the kind of edge rivalries demand. Whittingham’s comments, by contrast, sounded a lot softer than what Buckeye fans expect from anyone trying to lead a program into that fight.
At 66, and after so many years in one place, maybe Whittingham just isn’t wired for that level of theater anymore. Maybe he’s not in Ann Arbor for the long haul, either. But if the assignment is to bring some bite to a conference where the biggest games are supposed to feel personal in all the right ways, this wasn’t the sharpest first impression.
For Ohio State fans, that may be the best part of the whole thing. Without the kind of hard edge some coaches bring - the Curt Cignetti type, as the line goes - Whittingham may not look like the guy built to thrive in this kind of pressure cooker.
That doesn’t make him a bad hire. It just makes him sound like someone who may have arrived without enough hate to survive the job the way Buckeye fans think it should be done.
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