MADISON, Wis. — Luke Fickell had been Wisconsin’s football coach for nine months by the time his first game arrived last September, and excitement about the potential in Year 1 remained palpable. Fickell felt it, too. With 15 scholarship transfers, an overhauled Air Raid offense and an offseason spent emphasizing the mental and physical toughness required to finish games, Fickell believed the pieces were in place for immediate success.
But Fickell admits now, while sitting in his office on an unseasonably warm March afternoon, that he didn’t truly know in the way he would have liked. He thought he understood the program and its culture based on what he’d seen from afar. He thought his coaching staff was ready to weather adversity together. He thought the things that worked for him at Cincinnati, which went 53-10 over the previous five seasons and became the only Group of 5 team to break into the College Football Playoff, would fit the personnel at Wisconsin.
What Fickell did not foresee were issues on all those fronts. He didn’t envision a 7-6 season that failed to meet anyone’s expectations — particularly his own — and led him on a rollercoaster ride of emotions that he would call one of the most difficult stretches of his coaching career.
The preseason Big Ten West favorite Badgers finished with the same record as they did one year earlier in a campaign that resulted in Fickell replacing Paul Chryst. At one point last season, Wisconsin lost four of five games. Indiana captured its only Big Ten victory against Wisconsin, and the Badgers trailed at halftime by three touchdowns in a loss one week later at home to Northwestern. They also scored their fewest points per game (23.5) during a season in 19 years.
It was, in every way, an “eye-opening” learning opportunity for Fickell.
“Getting your ass beat has for me always been a humbling experience,” Fickell said. “But even the way in which we got beat, it’s incredibly humbling. Then when you take that good dive into it, it’s even more humbling. But I think those are all great things.
“My greatest growth periods are all the things that have been really the most difficult ass-whoopings or humbling experiences from the time I’ve been 15, 14 years old that have helped me be who I am. I’m hoping that this year was another one of those. But, yeah, it’s definitely different than the last five years.”
Wisconsin’s season ended with a 35-31 loss to LSU in the ReliaQuest Bowl. (Matt Pendleton / USA Today)
During a conversation with The Athletic, Fickell provided a window into the inner workings of the program, what went astray and the changes he has attempted to implement to put Wisconsin back on the path toward competing for championships. He sounded like a man who had done plenty of self-reflection in the two months since Wisconsin’s season ended with a ReliaQuest Bowl loss to LSU and was willing to place blame on himself for how he prepared the team.
“It’s a hell of a lot easier to reflect when you undershoot where you were,” Fickell said. “Because you’re looking for answers for yourself.”
Team leadership
Fickell was asked what he didn’t know about Wisconsin before he accepted the job that proved to be the biggest challenge last season. One of the areas he highlighted was what he called “the passion and the expectation” from those within the program. He makes it clear that’s not to say there weren’t plenty of players who cared about what happened to the team.
But Fickell, whose competitiveness has been one of his greatest traits since he was a high school athlete, noted that it didn’t consistently align with how he believed the atmosphere should feel amid Wisconsin’s disappointing season.
“Everyone’s disappointed when you lose,” Fickell said. “They weren’t pissed maybe in some ways. I don’t know why. That’s where it was like, it’s killing me. It’s eating at me. Maybe they did a really good job at not showing that. I think that sometimes, we’ve been kind of coached to not show our emotions. And that’s not the way I want to live. That’s not the way I want our team and our culture to be. I want guys to let each other know when they’re disappointed.
“Now, that doesn’t mean start arguing with each other. But there’s times when we’ve got to hold each other accountable and we have to as leaders create an expectation for the things that we do. As we got into it, when the adversity hit and things didn’t go our way, I don’t know that we were like an animal that got backed into the corner and was going to fight its way out. I’m not saying we accepted it. But it was just like, ‘Aw, s—, these things happen.’ So that’s why I think it made it difficult for me in some ways.”
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Understanding the psychology of his new team proved tricky for Fickell. Veteran holdovers had been a part of previous teams that struggled, as Wisconsin had gone three seasons without a Big Ten title game appearance — the program’s longest such stretch since the inaugural game in 2011. Last season, Wisconsin lost a Week 2 game at Washington State but stood 4-1 before a 15-6 loss to Iowa sent the Badgers on a slide. During that game, starting quarterback Tanner Mordecai broke his right hand. He missed the next month. That came two games after running back Chez Mellusi, another one of the team’s leaders, suffered a season-ending broken leg.
Things came to a head after the loss to Northwestern, when safety Hunter Wohler told reporters that players needed to demonstrate more care and effort, to “stop going through the motions” or get out of the program. Fickell said the issues addressed publicly by players during that losing skid were concerns he had shared with the team in private.
He saw that week as a turning point in the leadership within the group and came away from the end of the season feeling encouraged after Wisconsin beat Nebraska and Minnesota and hung with a top-15 LSU team in the bowl game. He noted that “we started to do some things that make me be able to sleep at night,” which he hopes carries over with the return of players such as Wohler and Mellusi, among others.
“I don’t think you can be successful in this game if you don’t live and die by it,” Fickell said. “And some would say that’s not healthy. But the reality is I think that’s the only way. That’s hard sometimes. But I think that’s a little bit a part of that culture that we need to have enough guys that they aren’t going to sleep very well and they aren’t going to feel like they’re going to be what they need to be if they don’t win.”
Wisconsin went 5-4 in Big Ten play during Luke Fickell’s first season. (Ron Johnson / USA Today)
Coaching togetherness
Fickell said the two areas most lacking to him last season were “leadership and alignment.” The latter, he said, had more to do with his coaching staff, which subsequently underwent significant turnover during the offseason.
“We had to do a hell of a lot better job when it came down to it, when adversity hit amongst us, I didn’t do a good enough job of making sure everybody was going in the same direction,” Fickell said. “Not just the players, but some coaches. Sometimes, all of a sudden, you start to get defensive and try to protect yourself as opposed to understanding the whole picture of things and put your ego aside to understand what we need to do.
“You’ve got to be able to understand that expectation. My wife would say the same thing: ‘Oh, you just expect to win every game.’ No. But there’s an expectation to how you do things. And there’s an expectation to when times get tough, how do you pick it up? How do you step up? As opposed to when times get tough, we don’t look for maybe Plan B. There is no Plan B. It’s that whole idea of you burnt the ships and this is all or nothing. We weren’t a great example of that as a coaching staff, and I think in return, I don’t know if we were a great example of that on the field.”
Fickell’s staff this offseason features four new assistant coaches. He replaced offensive line coach Jack Bicknell Jr. with Vanderbilt’s AJ Blazek. Three other assistants left for different jobs. Wide receivers coach Mike Brown went to Notre Dame, safeties coach and co-defensive coordinator Colin Hitschler accepted a job at Alabama and defensive line coach Greg Scruggs is now at Michigan. All three previously worked with Fickell at Cincinnati.
Fickell didn’t single out specific assistants but called the turnover “pretty healthy in Year 1” as long as it didn’t become an annual occurrence, noting that he hoped it would be beneficial for the program in the long run. He hired Arkansas wide receivers coach Kenny Guiton, former USC defensive coordinator Alex Grinch as his safeties coach and Air Force defensive line coach E.J. Whitlow.
“You don’t know what it looks like until adversity hits,” Fickell said. “It’s not like, ‘Well you were with this guy for four or five years, so you would know.’ No. Just like every year is different with a team, there’s different leadership and there’s different things with how does everybody kind of form together?
“We finally went through some adversity. We recognized the things that we need for our program. And I think it’s given us a chance to make those changes in Year 1. I don’t want to keep it up. But I also hope that those guys have opportunities that they see as better for their futures. Sometimes we don’t always see those things as eye-to-eye.”
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Fickell also had to work through how coaches adapted to personnel and schematic changes during the season. He said he wanted to play more three-down defensive alignments and more man coverage, as he did with defensive coordinator Mike Tressel when they were together at Cincinnati. But they realized once the season began — Fickell cited halftime of a Week 4 game against Purdue — that they had to alter their general plan because it didn’t fit the size and strengths of Wisconsin’s players.
Meanwhile, the offense failed to reach expected heights under coordinator Phil Longo, which was made even more challenging with injuries to Mellusi and Mordecai. Fickell said he never questioned whether he and Longo were on the same page during the season. But he did engage in conversations about how best to adapt the scheme to fit the personnel, particularly with injuries to players at the two positions Fickell believed they could least afford to lose.
“Everybody would say, ‘Well, shoot, you should’ve run the ball more,’” Fickell said. “Well, when you’re down and limited in your running backs, it’s hard, too. So it took us longer to say what can we do? How do we adjust and adapt? There were a lot of those things that went into the season where I put it upon myself to say I didn’t do a good enough job in spring and fall of recognizing who we were and what we needed to do to be successful.”
Wisconsin’s 2024 slate includes a nonconference visit from Alabama. (Jeff Hanisch / USA Today)
Why will Year 2 be different?
Fickell’s first full season at Wisconsin was instructive to him. Just because he has a good feeling about what could transpire doesn’t mean it will come to fruition. And while there are no guarantees, Fickell does know this: At 50 years old, he is as hungry as ever to field a winner.
What drives him are the sleepless nights and the understanding that Wisconsin is “not even close to what the expectation is” for him. He also believes he has a firmer grasp of how to make the necessary alterations to get there — something he succeeded in while at Cincinnati in turning his initial 4-8 season there into an 11-2 campaign the following year.
He has a year under his belt with returning players, who perhaps better recognize the expectations Fickell has. He said he believed Wisconsin was longer and more athletic at most positions, which was a focal point this offseason through recruiting and the transfer portal. The hope is that it makes implementation of schemes more seamless.
“I recognize our deficiencies in some of those areas,” Fickell said. “And we’ve been able to address them in a lot of different ways. You can either try to mask or avoid your deficiencies, or you can try to attack them head-on. Even had you won more games and maybe to the outside or to the naked eye, you don’t see some of those deficiencies, I hope and believe I would’ve truly recognized them.
“But it doesn’t allow you to make as many changes with everybody else. So I think now it’s more than just me. Anybody inside this program probably saw it and recognized it as well.”
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Fickell was asked what success looks like to him in Year 2 at Wisconsin, when the Big Ten’s expansion to 18 teams figures to make it harder for the Badgers to achieve their championship objectives. Wisconsin’s schedule features games against Alabama, USC, Penn State and Oregon, among others. Fickell didn’t specify a win total goal but returned to the idea of good leadership and complete alignment. He said his goal is to ensure Wisconsin reaches a point where it can consistently succeed despite adversity. That is how he defines a great program rather than a great team, which might win 10 games one season and four the next.
In Year 2, everybody needs to be rolling in the same direction. It’s Fickell’s job to help them get there.
“We’ve just got to make sure we’re recruiting kids that understand how hard it’s going to be,” Fickell said. “And that they understand that the only way you have a chance to be successful is if this is a little more life and death for you. You need that mentality. It doesn’t mean that they aren’t still well-rounded. But there’s a mindset of the type of person that it’s going to take to play the schedule that we’re going to play and be successful.”
(Top photo: John Fisher / Getty Images)
