Biff Poggi is not quite sure what his roster is going to look like when Michigan plays its final college football game of the season on New Year’s Eve. He expects the Christmas break to prove costly for player retention.
It is a perspective I have not yet heard up until this point.
We are in an era of college football where bowl games are on the decline. No matter how much you might enjoy watching them, the players are losing interest. That is especially true in Ann Arbor this season.
Michigan will play Texas in the Citrus Bowl.
What once looked like a promising season for the Wolverines very quickly became a complete and total disaster over the last four weeks. Not only did they miss out on the College Football Playoff with a loss to the Buckeyes, their head coach was fired for getting it on with a staffer.
The fallout from the Sherrone Moore scandal has been a disaster for the program.
Not only are the optics poor, Michigan is forced to enter into an unexpected coaching search after the coaching carousel had already stopped spinning. Schools like Florida, LSU and even Virginia Tech were already able to make big-splash hires. All of the top candidates from this cycle are locked in elsewhere.
And to make matters worse, the Wolverines still have to play their bowl game with an interim head coach.
Biff Poggi has been in this role before. The players are comfortable with the current staff. The only thing that will change is the guy that leads them out of the tunnel. It’s not that big of a deal.
However, the timing of the Citrus Bowl combined with the (lack of) importance of the Citrus Bowl and the Moore scandal is going to have a major impact on the roster.
Biff Poggi expects more college football players to opt-out after Christmas.
The Citrus Bowl is not a Playoff game. It is still one of the better bowl games but it does not mean as much as it used to. An exhibition game is an exhibition game— even if the two teams are ranked inside of the top-20. It’s not that important in the grand scheme of things.
Nevertheless, Michigan and Texas will play the Citrus Bowl at 3:00 p.m. ET on Dec. 31.
The Wolverines do not have that many players who decided to opt out of the bowl game as of right now. Poggi expects that to change.
He sent his team home for Christmas earlier this week. They will return to campus on Friday to prepare for next Wednesday. Some of them may not.
Poggi foresees a world where the players spend the holiday with their families, process all of the chaos that went down over the last few weeks, and decide not to play in the bowl game to enter the portal.
The interim head coach does not know what his roster is going to look like for a game played in a week. He will find out on Friday when his players either do or don’t return to practice.
It would be easier for Poggi to keep his roster in tact if they stayed on campus to practice. The time off could prove to be a problem.
Although the Sherrone Moore situation plays a direct role in this specific scenario, it certainly feels like the non-Playoff bowls are dying. They don’t matter as much as they used to. Players would rather get on with the next chapters of their careers. Why risk an injury?