If Wisconsin needed new blood, Luke Fickell was the clear choice

Note: rankings for this series are set by TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings. These will shift as the offseason goes on, with more transfer data becoming available over time.

At the time, Wisconsin’s decision to fire Paul Chryst early in the 2022 season was one of the toughest choices of the sort that we’d seen. Usually it’s a lot clearer how most people in college football feel about a firing—there was consensus that, for instance, David Shaw stuck around longer than he should have, or that Marcus Arroyo should’ve had more of a chance to demonstrate what he could do. But in the case of Chryst’s ouster, there was a legitimate split of opinion, which is surprisingly rare. The reasoning to support the move, that Wisconsin expects better than a ten-win ceiling and saw better HC options available, made sense. But the concerns with it, that the Badgers didn’t know they could actually improve on Chryst’s recent performance, were obviously valid.

Just under two months later, though, it got a lot easier to like that decision in hindsight. Wisconsin was able to secure the top candidate on the market, a coach who’d been among the best at his job for so long that many assumed he wasn’t even on the market. On top of shattering the Power 5’s seven-year stranglehold on the CFP in 2021, a season that earned him just about every Coach of the Year award in the sport, Luke Fickell closed out a 53-10 finish to his tenure at Cincinnati by sending the Bearcats into the P5 themselves. He’s spent almost his entire life playing or coaching in Ohio, and his coaching style preaches responsibility and resolve in a way that feels tailor-made for a program like Wisconsin.

The Badgers might not have known they’d be able to make such a near-perfect hire, but it’s hard to say the switch wasn’t a good move for the program. That being said, Fickell still hasn’t coached a game at Wisconsin (if you don’t count the Guaranteed Rate Bowl at the end of last season, for which he oversaw Chryst’s coaching staff). And the vast majority of hires, even good hires, even brilliant hires like this one, will eventually fail. That’s an acceptable fact, because the goal with Fickell is not that the Badgers never end up in this purgatory during his tenure—it’s about the ceiling, not the floor.

What’s the ceiling? Fickell and AD Chris McIntosh, who engineered this coaching change, have been fond of the phrase “championship level” in interviews, but what level of championship, exactly? The Big Ten title is a reasonable target, something the Badgers won six times between 1993 and 2012 but haven’t come all that close to since. This program is just over a decade removed from dismantling a top-fifteen team in Indianapolis—in a season where they finished third in the East at 4-4 and made the CCG via multiple postseason bans, which says a great deal about the weight of postseason expectations here. But each time the Badgers have made it back since, they’ve fallen short against Ohio State, by a blowout (59-0 in 2014), a death blow to a playoff-bound season (27-21 in 2017), and a blown lead (34-21 in 2019). The end of the Bret Bielema era was undeniably a sea change, and one of Wisconsin’s hopes for Fickell is clearly a return to the level of big-game performance he mastered.

But national championships aren’t entirely out of the picture Fickell is painting. The Badgers would have eight appearances in a twelve-team CFP if it had been implemented from 1998 on, more than programs like Michigan, Penn State, Texas, Auburn, Miami, Nebraska, and Tennessee. Those teams all believe they can claim a national title in the future; why not Wisconsin? Obviously, there’s a bigger structural disadvantage to overcome—had any of those names been on this team’s jerseys in 2017, they likely would’ve made the playoff over fellow one-loss team Alabama—but the new playoff structure should alleviate that to some extent. At the very least, the Badgers will have a seat at the table more often.

Actually getting to the absolute peak of college football is far more dependent on the select few programs that have dominated championships recently. Wisconsin’s ceiling is higher than many may realize, but barring fundamental changes to the parity of the game, it’s never going to be as high as teams like Georgia and Alabama. As for so many programs, the disparity in recruited talent is just too great to overcome from this end alone. That being said, if the top teams do regress towards the pack somewhat, the Badgers are betting firmly on Fickell to cover the rest of the gap. Many of the 2023 hires have an undertone of that growing need for high-level potential in case title competition opens up, and Wisconsin has picked one of the best names available for it.

I said last week that Purdue’s pick of Ryan Walters is my favorite hire of this coaching cycle. I still stand by that, but this move is absolutely the best. He’s a proven, capable head coach with local ties and a clear capability to take this program as far as it can go. How far that is, and whether this coaching change, will depend as much on the changing state of the sport as anything, but if the Badgers can reach greater heights than they have in recent years, Fickell is the man for the job.

The Last Five Years

The fact that Fickell was such a natural fit for Wisconsin also largely alleviates the prominent non-hire of Jim Leonhard, their longtime DC who acquitted himself well as their interim coach last season. The Badgers admittedly didn’t show too many signs of life under him—they barely survived a Nebraska team on a four-game losing streak by one point—but it was more than they showed across Chryst’s final two-and-a-bit seasons. That being said, that 2019 season is still pretty recent, and a very clear demonstration of just how much Wisconsin is capable of. Prevent a walk-off field goal by Illinois and hold a 21-7 halftime lead in the Big Ten Championship Game, and that team would’ve had a very strong argument over Oklahoma for the last CFP spot. There’s no doubt they can compete at that level.

2022 and 2023

Considering they had three different HCs¹ and lost back-to-back games by a combined 86-31 score within the first month of the season, Wisconsin made out pretty well last year. The Badgers took care of business more often than not and rarely looked the part of a team in turmoil, a credit to the part Chryst, Leonhard, and Fickell all played in handling a smooth transition into a new era of football in Madison. Particular credit is due to quarterback Graham Mertz, who was one of the worst starters in FBS in 2021 (6.9 Y/A, 10 TD, 11 INT) but made a superb start to 2022 (8.7 Y/A, 17 TD, 6 INT through eight games) before returning to earth in November.

The 2023 team has quite a few new faces in prominent places, including at QB, where SMU transfer Tanner Mordecai should jump-start the offense. The Badgers’ new starter tossed 72 touchdowns and 22 interceptions in his time with the Mustangs, including a staggering nine (plus one rushing) in a 77-63 shootout over Houston last year. OC Phil Longo, the architect of UNC’s top-ten offense in 2020, is another new arrival, and the killer one-two punch of Braelon Allen and Chez Mellusi returns in the rushing corps. Defense shouldn’t be a concern—it was already excellent last season, and Mike Tressel has crafted a similarly brilliant unit at Cincinnati in the last two years.

The Next Five Years

I often eschew the title of this segment to go a bit more general and address the real question here, which is almost invariably “will this guy even be here in five years?” But in Fickell’s case, that depends as much on the shifting landscape of college football as it does on his own success with the Badgers.

If the twelve-team playoff provides an avenue for this team to pursue the national championships it hopes to fight for, and if Fickell is the right man to lead them towards that goal, he’ll almost certainly still be here. But it’s not hard to see a world where Wisconsin’s new ceiling becomes playoff losses to Ohio State’s peers, rather than Big Ten Championship Game losses to Ohio State itself. And in that case, well…there’s every chance the Ryan Day era runs its course in Columbus, and Fickell ends up at the top of the Buckeyes’ list.

That’s pretty baseless speculation, admittedly, but so is just about anything that could be written here. The fact is, Wisconsin’s capabilities as a program are going to be a bit unclear for a while, until the bedrock of the sport settles again and the list of teams that can win a title in the twelve-team era becomes clear. The Badgers could’ve sold out for stability and kept Chryst, or even Leonhard. But the goal for this program, for better or for worse, is to take advantage of the potential for upheaval in a time of transition, and there’s no better man than Fickell to lead that charge.

1. Yeah, okay, we’re counting Fickell now.