Rastall Ramblings: Fickell Faces Do-or-Die Season

In some ways, it still feels a little surprising that Luke Fickell is getting a crack at a fourth season leading the Wisconsin Badgers.

It’s hard to characterize Fickell’s tenure as anything other than an abject failure through his first three years in Madison, with a 17-21 overall record, a 10-17 mark in Big Ten play, and the program on the heels of their first back-to-back losing seasons since the early 1990s. 

Fickell remains standing in 2026, but there can really be no doubt that the Badgers need to show marked signs of improvement and a return to a bowl game (at an absolute minimum) to justify seeing a fifth year at Wisconsin.

Attendance has nosedived, fan apathy is widespread and Fickell no longer has the protection of the athletic director that hired him in the first place.

For the many, many negatives attacked to the Fickell era, the Badgers did show at least the faintest bit of hope last November with ranked wins at home against Washington and Illinois. That’s obviously not enough to polish the turd of a 4-8 season — especially since they lost to Minnesota to close out the year — but it at least showed some signs of life when it looked like the team might be marching to a 2-10 record.

The departure of Wisconsin AD Chris McIntosh, one would think, strips away a layer of protection for Fickell since McIntosh’s successor Shawn Eichorst has no vested interest in keeping Fickell if he fails to get the ship steered in the right direction.

However, it seems like Eichorst might be better equipped to deal with the challenges of the new, hectic college sports landscape, and that could have some overall benefits for the football program.

Even though the Badgers have clearly been bad under Fickell, the very real issues with the program have been compounded further by a brutal schedule the last two seasons and some truly rotten QB health luck.

Wisconsin should, on paper, have a much more navigable slate of opponents this fall. If their preferred starting quarterback can avoid a season-ending injury within the first few weeks of the year, they’ll already be a major step ahead of the 2024 and 2025 teams.

Better injury luck and an easier schedule aren’t going to be enough to save Fickell’s job on their own, but it creates a potential avenue for success to pull the program out of the mud.

It’s hard to say exactly what Fickell needs to do to make it to 2027 as Wisconsin’s coach, though a return to a bowl game is a clear must. Even a 6-6 record feels like it might not be enough, nor should it.

Personally, seeing the Badgers get back to a 7-5 or 8-4 record while beating at least one of Minnesota and Iowa would be a mark of the Fickell experiment finding renewed life. Anything less and it seems apparent it’s time to cut ties on a coach that seemed like a surefire home run hire back at the end of 2022.