Column: Wisconsin football’s New Year’s resolutions for 2026
Laying out a handful of goals and benchmarks for the Wisconsin football program ahead of a pivotal 2026 season.
When the clock strikes Midnight on Jan. 1, 2026, everyone associated with the Wisconsin football program should be thankful to move on from what was a disastrous 2025.
The Badgers just endured their worst season since 1990, the first year of the Barry Alvarez era. They missed a bowl game for the second straight season, for the first time since 1991-1992, and the trophy case remains empty, with Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska all currently possessing the respective rivalry hardware.
With the athletics department committing to head coach Luke Fickell for 2026 despite his 17-21 record across three seasons in Madison — not to mention Wisconsin getting worse in each season since his hiring — it’s no secret that next fall is a massively pivotal campaign for all involved.
With 2025 finally in the rear-view mirror and the promise of 2026 upon us, here are my New Years Resolutions for Wisconsin football:
Sign a competent, healthy quarterback
You’d think that goes without saying, but Wisconsin has had an alarmingly difficult time finding a quarterback that is both competent and can remain healthy over the course of a season.
The injury portion of this remains largely out of anyone’s control. Still, Fickell addressed his program’s horrific injury luck towards the end of the season, asserting that he’s not writing off the litany of critical ailments as chance:
“You can’t just chalk it up to bad luck. [Strength and conditioning] Coach Brady [Collins] and I have talked about that over and over again,” Fickell said. “There’s not something that we’ve pinpointed… I do think when we have an older group of guys, Coach Brady and I have talked about this, we need to train them a little different, almost more like pros. As we move forward, in January, older guys will train in a different way.”
It remains to be seen, of course, how effective any alterations to the Badgers’ winter/summer conditioning programs will be. And no matter how carefully you train, football is a violent sport. Injuries happen, often at random (see: starting quarterback Billy Edwards Jr’s non-contact knee injury in the 2025 opener).
But more than anything, Wisconsin needs a competent quarterback. Unfortunately, we’ll never know if Edwards or Tyler Van Dyke would’ve panned out in Madison due to the season-ending injuries both of them suffered early on in their Badger careers. Thus, we can’t fault Fickell and his staff’s evaluation of both players. But that just means there’s added pressure on Wisconsin to sign the right quarterback in 2026.
As a quarterback-needy Power Four school, Wisconsin has been linked to several of the bigger-name portal gunslingers early in the process, including Old Dominion’s Colton Joseph and Notre Dame’s Kenny Minchey. Don’t get hung up on the name-brand quarterbacks, though. Whoever the program lures to Madison needs to be mobile and preferably has experience playing in a pro-style system.
Bad quarterback play has defined the Badgers over the past two seasons; Fickell simply has to get this one right.
Back up the “O-Line U” talk
Wisconsin has just about as good a claim to “Offensive Line University” as any program in America. That is, if you ignore the last four or so seasons of middling to downright abysmal play in the offensive trenches.
The Badgers’ misses at quarterback and on high-profile assistant coaches have been a big narrative attached to the failure that’s defined the beginning of the Fickell era. But the ineptitude of the offensive line in recent seasons has been one of the main hindrances to this program.
