Rastall Ramblings: Fickell Faces Prove-It Season with Wisconsin
To state the exceedingly obvious, the Luke Fickell era has not gone to plan in his first two seasons in Madison.
Arriving with much excitement in November 2022 after a successful stint at Cincinnati where Fickell helped guide the Bearcats to the College Football Playoff in 2021, the hiring of one of the most highly sought-after coaches in college football seemed like a major coup for Wisconsin athletic director Chris McIntosh and the Badgers as a whole.
There were heralded transfers brought in from the portal and immediate recruiting wins that promised better days ahead after things quickly unraveled at the end of the Paul Chryst era. The selling point was that Fickell wouldn’t just get Wisconsin football back on track. He’d take them to new heights.
Through two years, it’s been far from that. The Badgers own just a .500 record under Fickell and are coming off a 2024 season where they finished with a losing record and missed a bowl game for the first time since 2001.
The quarterback position has been a mess, compounded by injuries, and Wisconsin failed to capitalize on chances for marquee wins against Oregon and Penn State last fall that could’ve given a needed positive jolt to a program seemingly stuck in the mud.
Offensive coordinator Phil Longo was fired late last season, bringing an end to the once-ballyhooed Dairy Raid offense that never clicked and a partnership between Fickell and Longo where they strangely never seemed totally on the same page. Defensively, Wisconsin was too often bullied due to a lack of size up front.
New offensive coordinator Jeff Grimes comes to Madison with a reputation for offenses more predicated on physical rushing attacks than what Longo rolled out, which might sate segments of the fanbase that were unhappy with the program straying too far from its bread-and-butter identity for three decades (though that traditional Wisconsin offense had its struggles late in Chryst’s tenure.)
Grimes and new faces from the transfer portal like starting QB Billy Edwards, wide receiver Jayden Ballard and outside linebacker Corey Walker hope to help lead the Badgers into a season where they can get things pointed back in a positive direction.
In fairness to Fickell, the disappointment of the last two seasons isn’t all his fault. The wheels well and truly came off at the end of the Chryst era and even in the age of the transfer portal it wasn’t a slam dunk that he could come right in and have everything humming immediately.
However, this is a season where there needs to be some proof of concept, some signs of a discernible identity that can drive the program forward. Given how difficult Wisconsin’s schedule is expected to be this fall, Fickell is likely to get some leeway in terms of what kind of record would constitute a successful season. It’s hard to imagine he’ll be fired barring a total disaster of a year.
Yet with that challenging schedule comes ample opportunity for marquee wins, and Fickell and Co. simply must capitalize on a couple to win back some jaded fans. Even if he’s probably not on the hot seat yet, this is a vital season for Fickell if he wants to prove that the fanfare he was greeted with upon his arrival in Madison was more than just smoke and mirrors.
