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With the Wisconsin football team taking on the Nebraska Cornhuskers this Saturday, they are in the midst of an underwhelming season that could have seen it turn around in their last outing. As the Wisconsin football team almost upset the No. 1 Oregon Ducks, one college football insider had a short and simple answer when describing the season for the Badgers.
Looking at the Luke Fickell era of the Badgers, which started in 2023, they have been fine as he has a record of 13-11, but the positive trajectory of the program has been in question. In terms of insider Stewart Mandel, the one word he used to describe the team's season was “blah,” and says the next two weeks are vital for the program per his piece at The Athletic.
“The first word that comes to mind is, blah,” Mandel wrote. “I know Wisconsin often was viewed as a boring program in the past, but at least it was a winning version of boring. Now the Badgers are just boring, boring. Not terrible by any means. Fickell has won more games (13) than he’s lost (11) in two seasons. But I’m struggling to think of anything particularly special during the past two seasons. Just some moral victories here and there, like leading the No. 1 team in the country in the second half last weekend.”
“The next two weeks are extremely important for Fickell,” Mandel continued. “He has to beat either or both Nebraska or Minnesota. Missing a bowl game would be catastrophic. Not, fired-on-the-spot bad, but it would be a huge hole to dig out from.”
Wisconsin football's Luke Fickell heading into crucial offseason
A big story that happened recently was that the Wisconsin football team fired offensive coordinator Phil Longo as he was looking to implement the Air Raid style of play to the team. As Mandel would say, that hire by Fickell was a “big gamble” at first since it goes against their typical identity.
“The Longo hire was a big gamble that just did not pay off,” Mandel wrote. “It’s not just that the offense stunk, It stunk in Paul Chryst’s last couple of seasons, too. It’s that Fickell dared to deviate from the program’s identity of the past three decades, and it didn’t work. None other than Barry Alvarez has thrown shade on a couple of occasions this season. Last week, local radio host Ben Brust (the former basketball star) asked Alvarez what he thought the identity of this year’s team is. The Hall of Famer replied with a chuckle, “I can’t answer that. I’d like to see that myself.”
The Badgers could turn the season around as they need just one more win to be eligible for a bowl game, but as Mandel says, it will be an integral offseason, whatever the results are.
“Fickell will need to figure that question out himself this offseason, make the staff changes and add the necessary portal players to address it,” Mandel wrote. “As Curt Cignetti, among many others, has shown, coaches can remake the identity of a football program dramatically from one year to the next these days. If the Badgers look like this again next year, Fickell will be in trouble.”
The Badgers are 5-5, 3-4 in conference play, as they next face the Cornhuskers on Saturday afternoon.
