Wisconsin football commits to Luke Fickell as head coach for the 2026 season
Wisconsin is sticking with Luke Fickell for the 2026 season. Here’s why the Badgers doubled down, what’s driving the decision, and what needs to change.
Luke Fickell will return for a fourth season as the head coach of the Wisconsin football program. That’s the headline, the decision, and the reality is that the university has now planted its flag after weeks of speculation, mounting frustration, and a season that’s already in free fall.
Whether anyone feels good about that decision from up top is another conversation entirely. But the choice has been made, and it’s a choice that tells you just as much about the program’s present as it does its future.
This isn’t some soft endorsement quietly slipped into a midweek press release. This is Wisconsin publicly declaring that the coach responsible for a 15–19 record, a 2–6 start, and the worst offense in the Power Four is still the one they believe can lead the program out of its darkest stretch in 30 years. It’s a bet rooted in more than just patience. It’s layered with financial realities, deepening challenges inside the sport, and an athletic director whose reputation is now entirely tied to the man that he hired.
The news lands at a time when Wisconsin is staring at the possibility of back-to-back losing seasons for the first time since 1991–92. The Badgers have lost 11 of their last 13 games, and 10 straight in the Big Ten.
The transfer portal hasn’t yielded enough difference-makers, the injury list is lengthy, and the program’s on-field identity has evaporated.
And yet, Chris McIntosh is standing firm.
Wisconsin Plants Its Flag
If there were any doubts about where the athletic director stands, McIntosh erased them in a series of interviews that sounded like a philosophical defense he practically screamed from the mountaintops.
“Chancellor [Jennifer] Mnookin and I are aligned on significantly elevating investment in our program to compete at the highest level,” McIntosh said. “We are willing to make an investment in infrastructure and staff. As important as our ability to retain and recruit players in a revenue share and NIL era.”
That’s not subtle. That’s not lukewarm. That’s Wisconsin acknowledging out loud that its football program has been trying to compete with outdated resources in the most cutthroat era the sport has ever seen. It’s also an admission that whatever the Badgers thought it was investing in the past wasn’t close to what the modern Big Ten arms race demands.
McIntosh expanded on that theme again.
“If Wisconsin is going to be as competitive as we expect, the support has to be as competitive,” McIntosh said. “There’s no getting around it. Our people, our fans are passionate about Wisconsin football. I’d have it no other way. A successful football program is important to university, the state and our lettermen.”
You can hear the pivot in that quote. This isn’t about defending Fickell’s performance. It’s acknowledging that Wisconsin miscalculated the terrain of modern college football, and that catching up is now a non-negotiable.
If only the man tasked with running an athletic department built for the now and the future had shown the foresight to prepare for this era. The ability to anticipate, to rally resources, to crowdsource solutions. Those responsibilities didn’t suddenly appear in 2025. Instead, this sounds far more like a last-ditch attempt to justify his own employment after digging the program into a hole and unraveling decades of built-in stability.
A Program at a Crossroads
As it stands, Fickell’s contract runs through 2031. Firing him this year would cost the school more than $25 million, a number that only programs at the very top of the college football hierarchy can realistically stomach. Wisconsin isn’t in that stratosphere. Not in money from donors, not in spending, not in NIL, and certainly not in results. The Badgers are now comfortably in the running for the worst team in the Big Ten.
But McIntosh insists this isn’t about the buyout. He never considered a change. He believes in the same qualities he saw when he hired Fickell.
“He has the vision and fire to do it,” McIntosh said. “The same things that made Luke Fickell a unanimously great hire in 2022 remain. He’s a winner, program builder and developer of talent, and he understands the Big Ten.”
That’s the third vote of confidence in a season that still has a month’s worth of games left on the slate, for anyone keeping track at home.
But to anyone watching this struggling football team week in and week out, it also invites the next obvious question: Where has that vision been? Where is that developmental upside? Where is the on-field product that even remotely resembles a program-builder’s imprint? Just because those things happened at Cincinnati does not mean they have in any way, shape, or form materialized at Wisconsin. And that’s where the disconnect lives. McIntosh is content pointing to the past accomplishments and résumé of the man he hired; the fanbase is expecting results on the field.
Because the numbers paint an unmistakably ugly picture.
Wisconsin is 15–19 under Fickell, 8–15 in the Big Ten, winless against ranked teams despite having 10 cracks at it, and now more than a full calendar year removed from its last victory over a Power Four opponent.
The Badgers haven’t won a Big Ten game in over twelve months, have dropped six straight this season, and carry an 11-game losing streak to Power Four teams overall. Add in that Wisconsin is now 1–17 against Power Four competition when the opponent scores more than 20 points, the offense has bottomed out entirely, relationships with alumni and in-state recruiting circles have eroded, and it all becomes painfully obvious how far this program has fallen. Fickell continually redefines rock bottom.
That’s not “transition year” stuff. That’s structural failure.
Fickell has routinely shown he’s not a strong in-game manager, and nothing on the field suggests otherwise. He hasn’t won games, he hasn’t elevated a single phase of this program, and the talent already on the roster hasn’t developed in any way you can point to with confidence.
In many cases, you could argue he’s gotten less out of the talent he brought in. His constant flip-flopping on philosophy, both offensively and defensively, only reinforces how little he has actually understood the Big Ten. The very traits McIntosh cites as vindication are the same ones that make outside observers of Wisconsin, and a growing portion of the fanbase, feel increasingly convinced there’s no real reason for optimism.
And that’s where McIntosh’s messaging begins to shift from reassurance to introspection. Unfortunately, it hasn’t led McIntosh to the same conclusion everyone else around the program seems to have reached.
“This season has caused us all to have to look from within,” McIntosh said. “Luke has had to do that. I’ve had to do that. He has a willingness to be better. So do I, and so does Wisconsin from an institutional perspective.”
Translation: This isn’t just a football problem. It’s an everything problem.
The Plan, And the Stakes Behind It
McIntosh insists the university understands the scope of the challenge. And more importantly, he believes Wisconsin is prepared to act.
“Our intention is to be, in terms of our investment, on par with those that we intend to compete with,” McIntosh said. “Our expectations are to compete at the highest level in the Big Ten and beyond.”
McIntosh’s argument ultimately boils down to this: Wisconsin finally believes it can compete in the NIL era if it commits the resources. He says the school now has the corporate backing and sponsorship muscle to actually retain its own roster and recruit at a level fit for the Big Ten, whether that’s high school prospects or portal additions. In his view, the engine is already running; Wisconsin just needs to throw more fuel on it.
It’s the clearest admission yet that Wisconsin’s old playbook won’t work in the new Big Ten.
New facilities aren’t enough. Tradition isn’t enough. Development isn’t enough when you can’t retain. You can’t out-tough a checkbook. You can’t out-culture the transfer portal. You can’t sell “Wisconsin football” when the identity that term once represented has all but vanished.
That’s why this offseason becomes the most important of the Fickell era.
Because it isn’t just about getting healthy, finding a quarterback, or turning the offense into something more competent. It’s about whether Wisconsin can meaningfully fund a competitive roster in the NIL era. It’s about whether the staff can repair fractured relationships with alumni. It’s about whether in-state recruiting can be resuscitated. It’s about whether Fickell can reshape his staff with quality candidates, his scheme, and his overall approach without losing the locker room or the fanbase entirely.
McIntosh frames it like this:
“We all acknowledge this is short of expectations,” McIntosh said. “We have identified the ways in which we need to be successful, and we have a plan to be successful. We are executing that plan.”
But plans only matter if the product changes. And right now, Wisconsin is selling future solutions to present failures.
The Reality Behind the Retention
Fickell gets another year because of belief, because of alignment, and because of the financial architecture of modern college football. But most importantly, he gets another year because Wisconsin has no choice but to determine whether this approach can still work.
It’s impossible to separate this decision from the economics.
The school is trying to launch a competitive NIL model while sustaining the largest coaching contract in its history and absorbing the cost of multiple infrastructure projects. They’re not in a position to pay one coach $25 million to go away and then turn around and hire another for $8–10 million a year.
So they’re choosing to extend belief in a coach whose first three seasons have gone worse than anyone expected. They’re choosing to build around him rather than start over again. They’re choosing to hope that the person they hired in 2022 still exists somewhere beneath the misfires, the injuries, the questionable staff hires, and the identity drift.
The 2026 season now becomes the referendum. Not in the existential sense, because no athletic director will ever say that out loud. But in the real sense, the football sense, the sense fans understand intuitively.
Either the plan works, or it doesn’t. Either Wisconsin begins competing again, or the patience level will expire quickly. Because for all the investment talk, all the alignment, all the explanations about roster-building challenges and bad injury luck, one truth remains: Results still matter.
There are no excuses. Even for the things that aren’t Fickell’s fault, they’re still his problems to solve. His teams have routinely shown up underprepared, and ultimately, all of that falls back on the head coach.
This decision doesn’t close the book on Fickell’s tenure. It hands him another chapter, even if he hasn’t earned it, with the expectation that the ending must change. The challenge now is simple: Wisconsin must finally start acting like the football program it believes itself to be. And Fickell has to prove he’s still the head coach Wisconsin thought it hired.
For better or worse, Fickell gets that chance in 2026. And it’s remarkable how far the narrative has drifted from the day Fickell was introduced, when the hire was hailed as a program-changing coup and the future felt like a straight line to contention. Now, those same endorsements that once sounded like confidence ring far more like tone-deaf assurances from an athletic department trying to convince everyone that this is still salvageable.
Nevertheless, this is the path Wisconsin has chosen. For better or worse, Chris McIntosh has sealed his fate to Luke Fickell’s. If the Wisconsin football program finds its way back to relevance, he’ll be the lone believer proven right. If it erodes further, he’ll serve as the cautionary tale. The clock’s ticking.
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This was brilliantly written. Well done.