It’s tough to gauge Wisconsin football’s place in the Big Ten landscape entering the 2025 season. On one hand, the program was one of the conference’s more consistent winners for nearly three decades. On the other hand, its current iteration appears far from that steady winner.
Wisconsin’s overall slip in performance is retroactive to 2020, when the team finished 4-3, headlined by disappointing losses to Iowa, Indiana and Northwestern. While it responded well with a 9-4 finish in 2021, it has since taken several backward steps in the final standings — 7-6 in 2022 and 2023, then 5-7 in 2024.
Luke Fickell, one of the hottest names in the coaching profession at the time of his hire, was brought in to reverse that trajectory. Instead, the team is just 12-13 in two years under his leadership. Those years have seen an acceleration of the previous downward trend, including the mentioned bowl-less 2024 campaign.
That disappointing performance has seen much of the shine come off Fickell’s hire. Entering 2025, there is a growing question surrounding the program’s direction with him at the helm.
That is a perspective from within the Wisconsin ecosystem. For a glimpse at how Fickell is viewed nationally, he sits down at No. 11 in USA TODAY’s Paul Myerberg’s latest Big Ten football head coach ranking.
Here’s Myerberg’s perspective:
Like [Lincoln] Riley, Fickell has struggled since joining the Big Ten with major fanfare. After turning Cincinnati into a Group of Five powerhouse and reaching the College Football Playoff, Fickell has gone 12-13 in two full seasons with the Badgers, including last year’s team ending a run of 22 consecutive bowl appearances with the program’s first losing record since 2001. His missteps since arriving in Madison, notably at quarterback, makes this a huge season for Fickell’s future.
Fickell’s No. 11 placement lines up with where he slots in our Big Ten football head coach ranking from early February. After Wisconsin closed the 2024 season on a five-game losing streak, including losses to all three of the team’s top rivals, it’s hard to argue anything different entering 2025.
The bigger question is, what should be considered a success for Fickell and the Badgers this upcoming season? The team appears improved on both sides of the football, although it is set to face one of the toughest schedules in the sport.
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