As yearly team building becomes a puzzle, Chris Creighton’s EMU program considers all the pieces
Eastern Michigan is welcoming dozens of new players to the roster, putting forth a unique challenge for team building.
Ypsilanti — The good news for Chris Creighton, as Eastern Michigan adapts to life with 30-40 new players on the roster each year, is he’s long done team-building year-to-year.
“So I learned a long time ago, no matter what, even if you graduated just a few guys and you have your normal team, freshmen are becoming sophomores and all that, you always start over,” Creighton said in an interview with Mitten Football. “So Don Nehlen, great coach at West Virginia, at Anaheim, California, at the AFCA national convention, I'll never forget: I was a young coach and he said that no matter what kind of season they had the year before, that the offseason program was about reestablishing discipline. That was his thing. It was just like, if we were national champs or if we were 0-fer, when we come back in January, it's — we are establishing discipline. Who knows how many new people they had, but it's a new year, a new team. So discipline hasn't necessarily been my thing with it, but it's the commitment, right?”
He continued: “So we're keeping the program, but we're constructing a new team.”
That’s the nature of the beast for many college football programs in 2026: Massive year-to-year roster turnover, putting a premium on maximizing the work done in the winter and spring to build cohesion and form a team out of 100-odd football players. The Eagles have long made a concerted effort in this regard, but have made tweaks over the years; the amount of time spent on learning teammates and coaches as people has increased. And it’s all aimed at one goal: To merge dozens of new arrivals from high school, junior college and the transfer portal with the retained roster into the best possible football team by Sept. 5.
“You want to maximize people's strengths and you don't know what everybody's strengths are because they haven't been with ya,” Creighton said. “But you also want to maximize the short year that you have. You want the January run throughs to matter, the cumulative result of that to matter.”
This year, the Eagles have already made use of one of the scarcest assets: Time.
