Rastall Ramblings: Wisconsin Plays it Safe With Eichorst Hire

When it comes to Wisconsin Badgers athletics, it still feels like all roads lead back to Barry Alvarez.

After Alvarez’s handpicked successor as athletic director, Chris McIntosh, flamed out in the role, the University Wisconsin–Madison decided to replace him with the man who would have likely been Alvarez’s preferred successor had he never left Madison: Shawn Eichorst.

The announcement last week that interim chancellor Eric Wilcots tabbed Eichorst as Wisconsin’s new athletic director wasn’t exactly met with overwhelming fanfare from most Badgers fans, especially those who still remember his AD stint at Nebraska.

Eichorst made the controversial decision to fire the Cornhuskers’ head football coach Bo Pelini at the end of the 2014 season — a decision that still is a topic of debate amongst both Nebraska fans and college football fans in general over a decade later.

Personally, even though Nebraska would kill for Pelini’s results these days, I still understand why that decision was made. Pelini’s ceiling of going 9-4 or 10-4 every single season with blowout losses to essentially every ranked team they played was bound to wear out its welcome eventually when you consider that he was one of the biggest hotheads in the sport who was once caught on a hot mic blasting the school’s fans.

However, Eichorst’s decision to hire Oregon State’s Mike Riley — a guy who might’ve been a decent hire at one time but appeared firmly past his prime as a coach by 2014 — because he seemed mostly concerned with hiring someone with a kind, laidback personality to stand in contrast to Pelini’s boorish antics was a terrible process. It was a baffling hire from the moment it was made and helped kickstart a decade-plus of irrelevance for Nebraska football, and eventually got Eichorst canned.

While that is the glaring concern that can easily make one leery of Wisconsin’s hire of Eichorst, it’s fair to at least look at the potential upsides.

Eichorst is a native of Lone Rock in Richland County and played football at UW–Whitewater before eventually becoming Alvarez’s second-in-command in the athletic department. Eichorst served as the AD at both Miami and Nebraska before spending the last eight years working under Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte.

Eichorst is obviously very familiar with Wisconsin (both the state and the university) and while his Nebraska tenure raises legitimate concerns about his leadership abilities, it should be noted that college sports look radically different now than it did a decade ago and it’s possible Eichorst is better suited for this era.

At the very least, Eichorst has spent the last eight years working for one of the country’s most prolific athletic departments and was deep in the weeds on trying to effectively fundraise and utilize NIL in the new college sports landscape.

Of course, finding those avenues for success at Texas and at Wisconsin are two markedly different tasks, but at the very least Eichorst should bring an understanding of how to navigate NIL and fundraising challenges in a way that McIntosh never seemed able to grapple.

If nothing else, that’s a cause for at least a little optimism.