Report: NCAA punishes Wisconsin football after self-reported recruiting violations

Wisconsin football has been penalized by the NCAA for recruiting violations—its first major punishment since the Badgers infamous 2001 Shoe Box scandal.

Photo Credit: Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Well, this is a new kind of headline for the Wisconsin football program—and not the kind you frame and hang on the wall.

According to a report from BadgerExtra’s Colten Bartholomew, the NCAA has officially levied penalties against the Badgers for a series of Level II recruiting violations that occurred back in 2023.

The infractions stem from 139 impermissible phone calls made by nine different football staffers—including head coach Luke Fickell—to 48 different recruits. Yes, you read that right. 139 calls. Here’s the kicker: nearly all of them would’ve been legal had they just waited a few more months under the new rules that went into effect August 1, 2023.

But timing’s everything, right?

And yet, for a program that’s spent the last two seasons trying to find its identity, this feels almost poetically ironic. A team that couldn’t call—much less execute the right play on 3rd and short managed to break the rules, dialing into 4-star living rooms.

The NCAA may not have much power left, but Wisconsin still managed to put itself in position to get dinged anyway.

The details?

Fickell himself made nine impermissible calls. Outside linebackers coach Matt Mitchell made 19. Former defensive line coach Greg Scruggs—who left Wisconsin for a job at Michigan before resigning following a DUI arrest—racked up a staggering 71. And former General Manager Max Stienecker, now at USC, chipped in with 19 more. Five additional staffers accounted for the rest of the impermissible calls that offseason.

According to the negotiated resolution with the NCAA, 117 of the 139 calls came before coaches were even allowed to pick up the phone—and the other 22 broke rules tied to how often a prospect can be contacted once that window opens.

Penalties? Plenty to go around.

As part of the fallout, Wisconsin will serve a one-year probation and pay a $25,000 fine to the NCAA. Scruggs, who made the bulk of the impermissible phone calls for the Badgers, got a one-year show-cause order, a two-month ban from recruiting contact, and a one-game suspension.

Stienecker received a show-cause of his own and won’t be allowed to contact recruits for a portion of June 2025. Fickell and coach Mitchell won’t be permitted to speak with high school recruits from June 15–21, while the football program also self-imposed a three-week freeze on recruiting contact and trimmed down its evaluation days during the 2023–24 cycle.

So how did this happen?

The NCAA chalked it up to a perfect storm of missteps: a new coaching staff unfamiliar with Wisconsin's internal compliance processes, outdated systems for logging calls, and—perhaps most hilariously—a set of rule changes that hadn’t gone into effect yet. Tough look.

The NCAA called it: “a misunderstanding that telephone call rules were deregulated and no longer applicable.”

Translation? They thought the red light had turned green. It hadn’t.

To their credit, Wisconsin self-reported the issue and fully cooperated. The NCAA noted prompt disclosure, corrective measures, and an otherwise clean history as mitigating factors in handing down the penalties. But they still classified it as a Level II violation—defined as “significant breaches of conduct.” That's the program's first violation since the infamous Shoe Box incident that happened back in 2001.

Look, nobody’s tossing around the word “death penalty” here. But in today’s college football landscape—where it usually takes a burner phone or a McDonald’s bag stuffed with cash to actually get the NCAA’s attention—this one sticks out.

Not because it’s some wild recruiting scandal, but because Wisconsin somehow still managed to get dinged at all.

The NCAA doesn’t have the teeth it used to. We’re living in the Wild West now—transfer portal tampering, NIL deals happening under the table, tampering, and rules getting blurred by the hour. And yet, somehow, Wisconsin still managed to trip over a rulebook that most of the sport has long since stopped reading.

So, where does this leave Fickell?

Well, he’s now 12–13 as the head coach of the Wisconsin Badgers. The program hasn’t beaten a ranked team under his watch. And now, it’s got an NCAA violation on the books. None of this is program-crippling, but let’s not sugarcoat it: the optics are bad. And with a brutal 2025 schedule looming, the leash gets shorter if things don’t start turning around quickly.

In short? If you’re gonna push the rules, at least make it worth it on Saturdays. That part? Still very much a work in progress.

The identity overhaul is underway—but the question is whether it’s coming too late. Time will tell. So far, this staff has looked in over its head and nowhere near the level most expected when Chris McIntosh passed on Jim Leonhard to make the Fickell hire. Nobody questioned it then, but the return on investment hasn’t exactly shown up. The Badgers just missed a bowl and they’re trending downward.

Maybe there’s a turning point coming... but I’ve stopped holding my breath.

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