Why Luke Fickell is taking a different approach with Wisconsin football in Year 3
Luke Fickell is changing his approach as the Wisconsin football program struggles with depth, injuries, and consistency problems in Year 3.
Offensive line depth, quarterback injuries, coaching misfires: the list of issues that the Wisconsin football program has encountered since Luke Fickell was hired as head coach is long and complicated. And because of those shortcomings, Fickell has decided to change his approach.
Fickell has always been known as an intense competitor. Accountability and competition have never been in short supply in his program. But as the losses pile up, the Badgers' head coach says he’s making a deliberate effort to lead Wisconsin differently this year.
“You always look at things and think, what is gonna be the best thing, not for me,” Fickell told reporters. “It feels better sometimes to put your hand through a wall or through a window, right, that feels good at times, but in the long run, I don’t know what it does for us.
"So, understanding that we are gonna be playing with some redshirt freshmen, we are gonna be playing with some young guys. I can’t say, hey, it is about consistency, it's about development, at the end of the year, and then have the most inconsistent guy leading the program.”
That’s an admission of growth from Fickell himself. He’s not pretending losing doesn’t sting, because it's quite clear how much he hates losing, but he’s trying to model the same composure he asks of his locker room.
"I am not gonna rise and fall on everything that happens on Saturday,” Fickell said. “It kills you, it doesn't mean you don't feel bad, but your ability to come back the next day, find the things you need to get better at, is what that focus is. I am not gonna come in and lie to you. I'm not gonna come in on a Sunday and say, 'hey, it's alright, guys, it's okay.' That is not the case, but there is a difference between being positive and being honest."
From his perspective, the maturity of this team allows for that balance.
“I think the maturity of the team can handle the honesty, maybe a little bit more than some in the past,” Fickell said. “But, having that maturity to not accept a loss, but being able to move on from a loss, is not something I have ever been able to do a good job of. But, I challenged myself that when those things come up, and probably will come up at some point this season, is to do what I am asking the leadership of our team to do.”
That’s the kind of framing you want to hear from a head coach. But here’s the problem: none of it means much until it shows up on the field.
Quarterback has been a constant sore spot for Wisconsin under Fickell, and every season has seen the starter go down for an extended period of time: Tanner Mordecai to a broken hand in 2023, Tyler Van Dyke to a torn ACL in 2024, and now Billy Edwards Jr. to a sprained knee in the opener.
When the projected QB1 plays wire-to-wire, Wisconsin is 9–3. When a backup has to step in and finish a game or start, they’re just 6–11. It’s quickly become the defining storyline of Fickell’s tenure, and while Danny O’Neil has delivered some encouraging flashes, the revolving door at the most important position has made stability feel like a luxury the Badgers just haven’t had. To say the staff has had bad luck at quarterback would be an understatement, but it would also be dishonest to suggest that injuries explain away everything. Wisconsin hasn’t just been shorthanded: it has been sloppy, uninspired, and inconsistent across the board.
This staff has already had to answer for players quitting on them in each of the last two seasons, particularly during a five-game losing streak in 2024 that led to the program missing its first bowl game in 22 years. We haven’t seen clean football. We haven’t seen sharp execution. We’ve seen a team that looks stuck in a holding pattern, just asking for more patience.
The numbers tell part of the story. Wisconsin hasn’t beaten a ranked opponent under Fickell (0-7). His overall record in Madison sits at just 15-14 (8-10 in the Big Ten), propped up by the 2022 Guaranteed Rate Bowl, a game where he carried the title of head coach but wasn’t actually running the team.
The larger question is whether he’s surrounded himself with the right assistants to complement his role as a program builder. Fickell isn’t known as an X’s and O’s tactician. He’s a culture guy, a CEO-style leader, and carries a lot of the necessary qualities to win games in that respect. But when the staff misfires pile up, that comes back to him, too.
From the Phil Longo hire at offensive coordinator to the mishandling of the offensive line, both in personnel and in coaching, where they had to turn around and pay Jack Bicknell Jr. handsomely not to do his job anymore, the decisions haven’t inspired much confidence that the foundation is being built the right way. Add in the constant flip-flopping of defensive identities under Mike Tressel, and you’re left wondering if he’s a Big Ten caliber defensive coordinator. None of that screams stability, and together it raises real questions about whether this staff is capable of putting the right infrastructure in place around Fickell to move the needle.
That’s why the patience is thin. Yes, credit to Fickell for self-awareness and a willingness to change. He’s not stubbornly trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. But Wisconsin football is a results-driven operation. All the talk about positivity, leadership, and climbing the mountain only carries weight if it translates into clean football and growth on Saturdays.
Right now, Wisconsin looks no closer to being competitive in the new Big Ten than it did two years ago. If anything, it feels further away. At some point, the goodwill runs out. Fickell may be safe through 2026 given his contract, how closely his job is tied to athletic director Chris McIntosh, and the buyout figure. But unless that patience and positivity start turning into production and progress in a meaningful way, Wisconsin runs the risk of becoming an afterthought in a conference that’s only getting tougher.
"It is very challenging," Fickell admitted when asked about staying positive after the loss to Alabama. "But I don't know where else to go. The truth of the matter is, we knew this was going to be a mountain to climb. And I don't just mean this game. I mean this this entire season... Don't get me wrong, we're going to tear this thing apart and move forward, but we cannot lose each other at any point in time. Not in a game, not in a half, not in a quarter, and sure as hell not in a season."
That line about not losing each other stuck with me. For all the ways that Fickell and his staff have tried to embrace the 2025 schedule for what it is, it raised a little alarm. Maybe I’m reading between the lines, but it felt like Fickell already knows what’s waiting on the other side of this — Big Ten play, and in the month of October, a slate that includes Michigan, Iowa, Ohio State, and Oregon. It sounded like a coach who already feels the need to hold things together before the real grind even begins.
Now, maybe that’s just me reading too much into it. And to be fair, many of the adjustments Fickell has made this year feel like lessons learned, which I give him credit for. Jeff Grimes, for instance, looks like an offensive coordinator hire that actually makes sense. He runs a system that feels like a philosophical return to the program's roots but with a modern flair, and one that doesn’t put everything on the quarterback’s shoulders to move the football. On the other side, bringing in experienced bodies with legitimate size on defense who can hold up better against the run matters, too. Those are tangible steps in the right direction.
But if culture and "fourth phase" are truly as strong and improved as the people inside the program claim, then it’s worrisome to hear language that hints at keeping the locker room intact before any form of real adversity hits. It doesn’t mean Fickell can’t lead them, but it does make you wonder just how heavy this climb already feels to people inside the building.
And now comes the real test: how this team responds after a so-called measuring stick game where it was apparent they are still multiple tiers away from competing at a level that could conceivably have them in the College Football Playoff discussion and “competing for championships," which is the very thing Wisconsin fans were told was the vision when he was hired.
The frustrating part is that under Fickell, we’ve rarely seen four full quarters of football where the Badgers both came out of the gates looking well-prepared, executed at a high level, and sustained it for an entire game. That inconsistency has lingered, and with what lies ahead on the schedule, it’s hard to ignore. If this team is going to reach a bowl game, Saturday’s matchup with Maryland at home is close to a must-win. Otherwise, the fallout feels pretty predictable, and not in a good way.
That’s the tightrope for Fickell right now: appreciating the new tone he’s struck while recognizing it doesn’t erase the fact that inconsistency has defined his tenure to this point. The hope, of course, is that this shift in approach and his intentionality of being more positive will produce a team that truly sticks together, that understands how to move forward and put the setbacks behind them. But until that optimism translates into something more tangible on Saturdays, it’s hard to know whether this is growth taking hold or just another reminder of how far they have to go.
This is Year 3. It’s not unfair to say Wisconsin looks more like a team still searching for an identity than one closing the gap in the Big Ten. Patience has its place, but Wisconsin didn’t hire Fickell to tread water, and to this point, even maintaining the status quo has proven difficult for Fickell. He was brought here to raise the program’s ceiling, not to manage its floor.
Fair or not, that’s the standard Fickell will be judged against, and it's a standard the Badgers don’t look particularly close to meeting right now.
“It’s not easy, but I think it is what we need to understand what this journey is going to look like,” Fickell said. He’s right about that, but Wisconsin Badgers fans are tired of the journey without a destination.
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