Update (Saturday afternoon): Mike Elko should be someone Michigan calls. Will Elko accept? That feels comparably unlikely to Clark Lea accepting (more on Lea below). Elko doesn’t have the alma mater factor Lea has, but he also signed a big extension, and unlike Vanderbilt for Lea, Texas A&M might be a better job than Michigan. The recent recruiting ceiling has been higher. The SEC’s deeper than the Big Ten, but the top end is softer right now.
Anyway, if we give Elko 10/90 odds of accepting and put him in that first tier of candidates with Drinkwitz and Lea, we get these numbers:
- Fisch: 26%
- Drinkwitz: 23%
- Whittingham: 14%
- Brohm: 11%
- Elko: 8%
- Lea: 8%
- Poggi: 5%
- Minter: 3%
- Other: 2%
**
Update (Saturday morning): If you use the math below (with Whittingham vs. Poggi vs. Other a 65 vs. 25 vs. 10 choice if it gets to that point) but zero out DeBoer and Dillingham, you get…
- Fisch: 29%
- Drinkwitz: 24%
- Whittingham: 15%
- Brohm: 12%
- Lea: 9%
- Poggi: 6%
- Minter: 3%
- Other: 2%
Some thoughts:
I think Pete Nakos reported this morning that Jedd Fisch is still in the mix, and that Michigan’s level interest in Kyle Whittingham remains unclear. The biggest news there is Fisch, who seemed like a good fallback candidate before that rumor that he was out of the mix. One thing to consider here is whether some inside the Michigan braintrust don’t want Fisch, either because of the baggage or because they think Michigan could do better. If that faction exists, it would make sense for them to start a rumor calling attention to the baggage.
Beyond that, what’s happened so far still aligns with Michigan asking Drinkwitz first, then proceeding to Fisch and Brohm, then proceeding to maybe Whittingham and Poggi? Whittingham seems like a great hire for what they might need to do, which is buy a few years to clean up the athletic department while staying respectably competitive. Just my two cents.
ORIGINAL POST BELOW
**
Some disclaimers, to start this off:
- I don’t know anything! No inside sources. This is a lot of guesswork.
- I have money on this. This isn’t an attempt to move any markets, but if they moved in directions this post suggests, I would profit. In the interests of full disclosure.
- At the time this is published, I’m in no way affiliated with any sportsbook or prediction market.
- I’m going to use a lot of precise numbers to reflect imprecise probabilities. This makes the math easier, but this whole thing is guesswork. What’s the probability Kenny Dillingham wants to leave Arizona State? Somewhere between 1% and 99%. More likely, somewhere between 25% and 75%. We’re going to call it 50%. If you use this to bet (and I don’t recommend doing that), you should account for how wide and uncertain the confident interval is.
Now. Let’s talk Michigan.
There are a few categories of candidate for the Michigan job. Some of them overlap. There are the widely reported candidates: Kalen DeBoer, Kenny Dillingham, Eliah Drinkwitz, Jedd Fisch, Jesse Minter, Jeff Brohm, and Biff Poggi. There are the occasionally reported candidates: Clark Lea heads this group. There are the candidates who are reportedly definitely interested: Kyle Whittingham and Biff Poggi. Then, there are the speculated candidates, guys whose names haven’t been reported but who presumably showed up on at least some list at some point in the search: Adam Stenavich comes to mind for this. So does Lincoln Riley.
There are some facts, reports, and confident inferences here too, and those are important. One is that the transfer portal opens on January 2nd and Michigan would like their coach hired by that point. One is that Michigan’s using a search firm. One is that Michigan’s investigating their whole athletic department in the wake of the Sherrone Moore, Connor Stalions, Matt Weiss, Jim Harbaugh, Jesse Minter, and Juwan Howard scandals, and there’s no guarantee athletic director Warde Manuel will keep his job. One is that Michigan has an interim president right now. The takeaway from those last two is that there are a lot of different opinions in the decision room and no one has absolute power.
A quick read on each of the main speculated candidates:
Kalen DeBoer
I don’t know if he’s at all interested. For the purposes of the math below, I’m going to call it 25/75, since he’s been so forceful in his denials of interest. I do know that after Alabama lost to Florida State, Alabama fans were a lot less happy with Kalen DeBoer than they are now. Would losing to Oklahoma in a playoff game draw the same reaction? Probably not. But DeBoer’s either going to exit tonight a non-candidate (because he’s still coaching and Michigan wants their coach hired before New Year’s) or someone a real percentage of Alabama fans would like to see leave.
Kenny Dillingham
I don’t know if he’s at all interested. For the purposes of the math below, I’m going to call it 50/50. The trend has been for head coaching targets to stay put, especially at their alma maters, but Michigan’s a place with a lot of history and resources, and Dillingham will probably always be fighting an uphill battle at Arizona State.
Eliah Drinkwitz
I don’t know if he’s at all interested. For the purposes of the math below, I’m going to call it 25/75 since he did recently sign an extension and he reportedly turned down Penn State. That said, his buyout’s pretty small, and Mizzou is a little like Arizona State in that the ceiling’s only so high.
Some Michigan fans view Drinkwitz as a non-starter because he made two Connor Stalions jokes in interviews in 2023. This is way sillier than the Alabama fans who want Kalen DeBoer gone.
Jedd Fisch
Jedd Fisch is probably interested. He coached at Michigan before, it would be a step up from Washington, and he’s not native to the Pacific Northwest. The question is whether Michigan is interested in Jedd Fisch. There was a report earlier this week that Fisch was off the board. That report was paywalled, but it was echoed by Josh Pate without much explanation. There’s speculation that Fisch would be off the board because Michigan doesn’t want any baggage and Fisch has some baggage related to Jayden de Laura. My two cents: If Michigan wants to hire its forever coach, Fisch is a candidate. If Michigan wants someone to competently steer the ship for a few years while they clean up what Jim Harbaugh’s obliviousness and/or nefariousness wrought, maybe just hire Kyle Whittingham.
For the purposes of the math below, I’m going to assume Fisch is 50/50 to be a candidate at all.
Jesse Minter
There are a few problems with Jesse Minter. One is that he might still be under a show-cause order from his recruiting violations at Michigan. One is that he’s probably going to coach in the NFL playoffs, which would make even brief double duty very hard. The biggest is that he might be a candidate for some NFL head coach positions. The money might be comparable, but the lifestyle’s easier in the NFL right now.
For the purposes of the math below, I’m going to assume that Minter’s 25/75 to be a candidate at all and 25/75 to accept the job if offered.
Jeff Brohm
Evidently there were some big message board fights this week over Jeff Brohm? Whether he’s good enough to be Michigan’s coach? I don’t know if he’s interested. 25/75 on that front. I believe he’s on the radar but I also believe those who say he’s behind DeBoer, Dillingham, and Drinkwitz in the pecking order.
Biff Poggi
The one guy where we know there’s mutual interest. The one guy we’re pretty confident already interviewed (maybe that’s even been confirmed by now). Should Michigan hire him? No. He might be a cool guy, but his head coaching tenure at Charlotte went terribly. Will Michigan hire him? Maybe. Even if they struck out on everyone above him on the list, I struggle to see why Michigan would hire Poggi over Whittingham unless Whittingham got into the room and did one of these.
Kyle Whittingham
I don’t know if Michigan’s interested in Whittingham. Maybe that’s been reported, but I haven’t seen it. For our purposes, I’m going to put him below the Brohm/Fisch/Minter tier of candidates. He’d be a great short-term coach, but he’s a lot older than all these guys besides Poggi, and he’s a different style of candidate, having coached for so long at such a specific place.
Clark Lea
Maybe others are reporting this too, but it seems like the majority of the Clark Lea buzz is coming from Joel Klatt, and I’m not sure how much that’s reporting and how much that’s speculation. 10/90 that he’s an option. I don’t know what his buyout situation is, but I’d view that more as a barometer of his interest in leaving Vanderbilt (his alma mater) than as a barrier to Michigan’s search.
**
Overall, then, we’ve got the following pecking order once DeBoer wins or loses tonight:
Tier I: DeBoer, Dillingham, Drinkwitz, and…Lea? DeBoer’s 50/50 to lose and 25/75 (by our estimate) to be interested. Dillingham’s 50/50 to be interested. Drinkwitz is 25/75 to be interested. I’m putting Lea in this group but only calling it 10% likely that he’s an option. On one hand: Why wouldn’t Michigan want him? On the other: Why does every article I’m finding tie Lea speculation back to Joel Klatt and Joel Klatt alone?
Tier II: Fisch, Minter, and Brohm. Fisch is 50/50 to be a candidate but he’s probably interested. Minter’s 25/75 to be a candidate and 25/75 to be interested. Brohm is probably a candidate but he’s only 25/75 to be interested.
Tier III: Whittingham and Poggi? I don’t know about this. If the search gets past those first seven, I personally don’t see why they wouldn’t just hire Whittingham unless they’ve got a rock star calling in saying he’s interested. There’s also the obvious case for Poggi if it’s December 30th and they don’t have anyone else yet. But it’s not like Whittingham’s interest is a new development, and we didn’t hear much about him until these last 24 hours.
Alright. Who’s ready for math?
We have to go tier-by-tier here, and the easiest way to do this in each tier is to multiply out the probabilities of each possible combination of interested candidates. For example: There’s a 50% chance DeBoer loses tonight and we think there’s a 25% chance he’s interested if he does lose. That comes out to 12.5%. Multiply that by our 50% chance Dillingham’s interested, our 25% chance Drinkwitz is interested, and our 10% chance Lea is interested, and there’s a 0.15625% chance Michigan has its pick between all four top candidates. Again, this is way way way way too precise a number for what we’re doing. But if we continue that process and randomize who Michigan chooses from whatever pool of candidates Michigan ends up with, we get the following probabilities after running through every combination of possible options:
- Dillingham: 39%
- Drinkwitz: 17%
- DeBoer: 8%
- Lea: 6%
- None of the above: 30%
A big assumption we’re making here is that DeBoer is part of this tier and not part of his own tier. We’re making that assumption for two reasons. The first is that we’re erring on the side of not knowing anything (while still being precise, because I’m not building a full Monte Carlo simulation model for this…yet). The second is that for all DeBoer’s success at Washington, I’m not sure his track record is actually as impressive as these other guys’ track records. It makes sense for Michigan to have slow-walked this. They can find out who all the candidates are and then make their moves. I don’t take that as an indication that they’re waiting on DeBoer, specifically.
Moving on to the second tier, that same process gives us the following probabilities:
- Fisch: 13%
- Brohm: 5%
- Minter: 1%
- None of the above: 11%
What happens if all seven of these candidates are off the board? At this point, Michigan could turn to Whittingham or Poggi, or they could continue down their list. Whittingham’s interest shouldn’t be discounted, but neither should Poggi’s incumbency. Personally, I’m saying:
- Whittingham: 7%
- Poggi: 3%
- Other: 1%
And that, at long last, gives us this list heading into tonight, at which point it will be shaken up by Alabama’s result if it hasn’t been shaken up already:
- Dillingham: 39%
- Drinkwitz: 17%
- Fisch: 13%
- DeBoer: 8%
- Whittingham: 7%
- Lea: 6%
- Brohm: 5%
- Poggi: 3%
- Minter: 1%
- Other: 1%
Do with that what you will.
**
