Luke Fickell Is 1 Win From A Wisconsin Breakthrough, But Notre Dame’s In The Way

Luke Fickell has a chance to flip his fortunes in Madison, Wisconsin, quicker than LSU can say, Joey Freshwater was a mistake on Saturday. Fickell — who otherwise might be looking at his fourth and final season as head coach at Wisconsin — is just one win away from having the Badgers faithful chant his name in exuberance. To do that, though, he has to beat his mentee and one of the best programs in the sport — Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman and his No. 4 Fighting Irish. Perhaps, though, Fickell has done the work necessary to expect to win at Lambeau Field. He’d have you know he’s reached the fifth stage of grief: acceptance. “I’m not naive. I don’t want to be naive. I think for a couple years, at least for a year and a half, I was pretty naive,” he told me and other reporters at Big Ten media days. Wisconsin fans might think that’s an understatement, that they’re not even playing for anything this year, but that’s because they participated in the other four stages of grief too: denial, anger, bargaining and depression. They probably agree, too. Fickell was naive. He knows he was naive to believe he could continue to coach as he had before accepting the job in Madison. He knows he was late to adapt to NIL, to the volatility of the transfer portal, to how difficult it was and will be to return Wisconsin to the top of the Big Ten again. Naive about what it takes to return Wisconsin to respectability? Perhaps. The Badgers haven’t won more than 10 games since 2019, and Fickell has overseen two losing seasons since the Big Ten extended to 18 teams. And now, the Badgers are 20.5-point underdogs against Notre Dame on Sunday in their season opener and haven’t themselves been ranked in the preseason AP or final AP poll since 2019. It’s easy to forget Fickell was one of the best coaches in the country before accepting the job at Wisconsin. He’d won 53 games in five seasons at Cincinnati and is the first head coach to lead a Group of Six team to the College Football Playoff and the only head coach in the four-team CFP era. It’s also easy to forget that Wisconsin has won 99 games in the age of the CFP and has never received an invitation to participate. Only six teams have won more games and never made the playoff, and only three of them are Power Four programs (BYU, Utah and Iowa). But, to put it kindly, Wisconsin is slipping. It’s been slipping since former Badgers coach Paul Chryst was fired in the middle of the 2022 season, and that’s, in part, due to Fickell. In July, he admitted he missed the essential meaning behind a phrase former Ohio State coach Urban Meyer used to remind coaches just how important the task of staying locked into their jobs is for their futures. “If you sleep on the game, you’ll wake up one day, and you’ll be passed by,” Fickell said. “You’ll forget what to do. I always thought that was scheme to me. Like right, you are continuing to evolve in the scheme of things. The truth of the matter is it’s not recognizing what’s going on within the landscape of things.” Fickell is an old-school ball coach. He thinks of Wisconsin football like a family business that’s been around since 1889. Not like a startup — a project led by a visionary entrepreneur with a commitment to developing a scalable business model that makes the company grow at 10 times the valuation every five years out of necessity to feed profits and the hunger of investors. On Saturday, Fickell will shake hands with and coach against Freeman, a man he helped teach to become not just head coach but also one who has never slept on the game. Freeman’s team is one of the best in the game, and that’s because, along with being a great coach, he understands the importance the transfer portal, eligibility rules and name, image and likeness play in the Fighting Irish’s pursuit of their first national championship since 1988. Given the success Freeman has had since becoming head coach in South Bend, Indiana — notably reaching the CFP national championship game in 2025 and posting a 43-12 record since taking over as head coach — it’s no surprise that Fickell has forced himself and his staff to answer difficult questions about what’s stopping the Badgers from competing on the same plane as the Notre Dame team they’ll face in Week 1. Fickell is the first to admit there are no shortcuts to success on that level. It’s a slower process than fans, his investors, would like. And Fickell knows the absence of results this season could lead to him being out as head coach at Wisconsin. His seat is hot. “There are easy ways to go about it,” Fickell said. “And I think there are people out there that do take some easy ways. You sure as hell aren’t going to do that here. Whether that means you’re on a hotter seat than you were before, I don’t know if it can get much [hotter].” It could also get cool. Fickell is a win away from rewriting his and the Badgers’ future. A win against this Notre Dame team could do just that.