Why Wisconsin football donor Ted Kellner thinks 2026 will look ‘decidedly different’

Wisconsin football's top donor, Ted Kellner, explains why he believes that 2026 will be “decidedly different” for the Badgers under Luke Fickell.

Wisconsin Badgers head football coach Luke Fickell and Ted Kellner shake hands after a game at Camp Randall Stadium. Photo credit: USA TODAY.

The temperature around the Wisconsin football program has been trying to keep itself from dropping below freezing.

Everyone involved: fans, donors, administrators, and the players, are wrestling with myriad emotions, questioning expectations, managing frustration, and constantly searching for perspective. At a time when clarity has been hard to find, a notable voice stepped forward to offer it.

For Wisconsin, that voice belongs to Ted Kellner, one of the most influential donors in school history and someone whose investment is now quite literally being built into the foundation of the program’s future.

The Kellner Family Athletic Center, a $100 million project jump-started by a $20 million gift from Ted and his wife, Mary, will soon stand as the physical symbol of Wisconsin’s commitment to football. Kellner himself represents the personal side of that commitment, steady and decisive and openly confident in the people he’s chosen to put his trust in during one of the most turbulent stretches the program has faced in decades.

And today, that belief centers around Athletic Director Chris McIntosh and, by extension, Luke Fickell. The public frustration is real. The record is subpar at best. The questions about identity, development, discipline, and direction aren’t coming from the vocal minority. They’re coming from people who have watched Wisconsin operate at a high level for decades.

The frustration isn’t baseless by any means. Fickell is 16–20 during his tenure at Wisconsin, including 1–11 against AP Top 25 opponents. The Badgers currently sit at 3–7 on the season and 1–6 in Big Ten play, marking the program’s first back-to-back losing seasons since 1991–92.

Now, the criticism toward McIntosh and Fickell has reached a volume that this athletic department simply has not dealt with in the modern era.

But Kellner? He’s not wavering. In fact, he’s as resolute as ever.

Ted Kellner’s Case for Staying the Course

Kellner was asked a question during an appearance on ESPN Milwaukee that reflects the growing conversation in the fanbase: if Wisconsin needed to pay a buyout price north of $27 million to relieve Fickell of his duties and hire someone who might give the program a better chance to win now, would he support that decision? His response was unambiguous.

“First of all… I think firing Luke Fickell today is a huge mistake,” Kellner said. “If you look at where we are and what’s happened… Chris McIntosh addressed this very well. If people want to go back and see what he sent out to Badger Nation in the form of a letter… I don’t feel that I’m qualified to answer all the questions as to what’s going on in football.

“Chris McIntosh is just incredibly qualified to answer that question, and unequivocally, Chris has said no, don’t fire Luke Fickell.”

With emotions running high, it’s also clear that the athletic department has made a concerted effort to control the temperature around the program. McIntosh met with players in the locker room, then connected with recruits to steady the message about the program’s direction, followed by a public letter to the fanbase outlining why Wisconsin was staying the course.

Kellner’s appearance only reinforced that coordinated push, serving as another voice attempting to validate the plan and redirect the attention toward what Wisconsin believes is still possible.

For Kellner, the conversation always comes back to McIntosh. His trust in the athletic director was forged years ago when he sat on the search committee that recommended McIntosh for the job — a process deeply tied to Barry Alvarez, whose influence still resonates inside the department.

Kellner, long connected to Alvarez, views that lineage as important. Alvarez believed in McIntosh; Kellner believed in Alvarez; and McIntosh continues to believe in Fickell. That continuity matters to him.

“Chris McIntosh is eminently qualified to make that decision,” Kellner said when asked whether or not Fickell should be fired. “If Chris were to say to [Chancellor] Jennifer Mnookin, ‘We need to terminate our coach,’ you terminate our coach. If he says you keep him, then we keep him. And he unequivocally, to her and to the public, has said that we keep him.”

From his perspective, context matters. He pointed to a season that’s been shaped by injuries, a brutal strength of schedule, and a struggling offense limited by personnel issues — challenges that, in his view, would test even the most established coaching staffs as they try to find their footing.

“Of the 22 penciled in players who started at the beginning of the season, 11 didn’t play in the Oregon game,” Kellner noted. “He [Fickell] hasn’t had a starting quarterback for three games into the season, the last three years. He’s had to move around on the offensive line… It’s a litany of things.”

Those numbers line up with what Wisconsin fans have lived through. The Badgers are the only Big Ten team this season to have four different quarterbacks attempt at least 10 passes, something the program hasn’t experienced since 1956. And in the Fickell era, Wisconsin has had its projected season-starting quarterback play the entire game in only 11 of 36 contests to this point. Notably, they’re 8–3 in those games.

In Kellner’s eyes, Fickell is not failing because he lacks competence or vision, but because Wisconsin has been operating within constraints that limited its competitiveness in college football’s new era. “I don’t think Luke Fickell is taking stupid pills as a coach,” Kellner said. The phrasing might be blunt, but he feels Wisconsin’s problems go beyond coaching.

The next step, Kellner believes, is to close the gap between Wisconsin’s ambitions of “competing for championships” and its resources.

Top-Tier Resources, a Changing Landscape, and the Stakes Ahead

The heart of Kellner’s argument is simple: Wisconsin fell behind the rest of the Big Ten in the financial arms race, especially in terms of NIL funding.

It wasn’t some shocking revelation so much as it was an overdue acknowledgment of something that had been quietly speculated among the fanbase for a while. And coming from someone with direct access to knowing those realities firsthand, it carried a different level of weight.

“It changed dramatically in the last two years, and we did fall behind [in the NIL arms race],” Kellner explained. “All I can say is… we will be competitive next year in the money.”

He expects a dramatic leap in that area.

“We’re in the bottom third of the Big Ten in financial resources,” Kellner said candidly. “Next year, we will be up in the top third in resources. We were at the lower echelons this last year. We won’t be next year.”

Kellner’s optimism is evident, but it also helps define the size of the jump Wisconsin is claiming it can make. The Badgers aren’t talking about climbing one tier on the proverbial spending ladder. They are talking about leaping from the bottom third of the Big Ten conference in spending to operating in the same financial neighborhood as the top national brands in this new arms race. That is a massive leap for any program, and it is fair to wonder how quickly that gap can be closed in practice.

And this is where the conversation shifts from belief to execution.

Kellner has unquestionably done remarkable things for Wisconsin, and his trust in McIntosh — and McIntosh’s trust in Fickell — is genuine, even if some believe that faith may be misplaced. But belief is only worth as much as the actions that follow it. The people steering this rebuild have overpromised and underdelivered to this point, and even if they have secured new streams of funding behind the scenes, the program has reached a point where the only convincing evidence will be results. Words are easy. Funding a competitive roster and fixing a drifting program is not.

It was an unusually candid admission from someone at Kellner’s level of influence, not just that Wisconsin misread the new landscape, which was evident, but that it is finally prepared to operate in the same competitive tier as programs like Oregon, Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, and USC.

But even he understands that an increase in funding guarantees nothing.

“Now, you have the resources,” Kellner said. “It’s great to have the resources, but then you’ve got to pick the right ones. You’ve got to pick the right people. Are you going to give your QB two and a half million, three million? How you allocate those resources will become critical.”

And that brings the conversation right back to Fickell and McIntosh.

Allegedly, Wisconsin will soon have the financial power to compete, something Kellner’s philanthropy has helped make possible. Still, the question lingering beneath his optimism is whether this staff can maximize those resources. Injuries and a difficult schedule explain parts of Wisconsin’s 2025 season, sure, but they do not explain all of it. The lack of player development, execution, and overall identity during Fickell’s tenure is notable, and they are all areas that money alone cannot fix.

Still, Kellner remains convinced that 2026 will look nothing like 2025.

“Next year will be decidedly different on the field,” Kellner said.

The Washington upset and the competitive first half against Indiana, led by some of the youngest contributors on the Badgers roster, only reinforced Kellner’s belief that the culture and foundation of the program is more solid than the record suggests. His confidence is rooted in experience. It comes from decades of watching Wisconsin grow from a regional program into a national brand, from walking alongside Alvarez during the program’s ascent, from investing in the next generation of infrastructure through the Kellner Family Athletic Center, and from believing that the leadership in place understands what needs to change.

But optimism does not erase consequences.

Kellner openly acknowledges the steep financial cost of college football’s coaching market. It’s a world where contracts get paid out for failure as liberally as they reward success, yet he believes the time to judge Fickell will come after Wisconsin commits the resources needed to compete.

“You sign a contract at the outset, and you say, if you’re bad, we’re going to pay you X number of millions of dollars to go away,” Kellner said. “That’s what the world is, that’s what the market is. But to me, that’s a little bit backwards. You don’t pay exorbitant, huge dollars for lack of success, failure in some instances. But it speaks to the cost that exists in terms of what they were willing to pay those coaches and agree to.”

Wisconsin has chosen not to go down that road this offseason. Instead, it is choosing to align behind the people they hired, the plan they believe in, and the infrastructure they are finally ready to fund at a competitive level.

Whether that belief pays off will define the program’s future.

From Kellner’s perspective, the investment of resources and the backing of the university’s leadership are not being made blindly. It’s happening because the people he trusts most believe it will work. But if 2026 doesn’t look “decidedly different on the field,” the narrative will shift in a hurry.

But it won’t be because Wisconsin lacked perspective, commitment, or belief in the plan. Right now, Kellner is among the influential people behind the scenes who still appear to believe in that approach. And for someone whose checkbook and long-standing role in shaping Wisconsin’s future give him a clearer vantage point of what’s coming than most, that faith in what’s ahead is about all fans can reasonably hang their hat on.

Wisconsin football is entering a year defined less by rhetoric and more by what actually shows up on the field. The promises are bold, the resources are supposedly coming, and the belief from people like Ted Kellner remains unwavering. But faith isn’t a strategy, and sentiment doesn’t win games. The Badgers have chosen a path rooted in continuity, alignment, and the hope that investment will finally meet results. Now they have to prove that hope is justified. Because 2026 won’t just determine how this era is remembered; it will determine whether this era gets to continue.

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