Wisconsin football coach Luke Fickell acknowledges ‘hot seat’ reality

CHICAGO – As Wisconsin football coach Luke Fickell went through his litany of interviews at the Big Ten’s annual football media days, he recalled getting a question about his 2011 season as Ohio State’s head coach.

That was when the Buckeyes were reeling from NCAA violations and Jim Tressel’s resignation. Fickell’s Buckeyes went 6-7 and lost to Florida in the Gator Bowl. (Ohio State then hired Urban Meyer as head coach, and Fickell returned to his past role as defensive coordinator.)

“I guess I learned what a hot seat really was,” Fickell said.

Fast-forward 15 years, and Fickell is back on the “hot seat” after an underwhelming first three seasons as Wisconsin’s head coach. He’s not shying away from the unsavory label either.

“I know it’s a hot seat,” Fickell said while thanking the reporter in apparent jest for bringing it up.

Of course, it is hard for Fickell to not notice his unsightly reality.

He has overseen UW’s first back-to-back losing seasons since the early 1990s. His Badgers suffered back-to-back shutout losses in 2025 – a 37-0 loss to Iowa and 34-0 loss to Ohio State – for the first time since 1977. His all-time record at UW is 17-21 overall and 10-17 in Big Ten play.

Ex-Wisconsin athletic director Chris McIntosh backed him through the losing seasons, but McIntosh made the move down Interstate 90 to the Big Ten Conference offices to accept a new role as deputy commissioner for strategy.

At the time of McIntosh’s departure, Fickell said that “losing a friend is not easy.” There’s no guarantee that McIntosh’s replacement, Shawn Eichorst, exercises that same level of patience if Fickell’s promised improvement does not pan out.

Fickell’s buyout – if he is fired on Dec. 1 of this season – would be roughly $21.3 million and could be somewhat of a deterrent. (That’s barring any potential buyout negotiations or buyout mitigation if Fickell finds comparable employment.)

But there also would be a cost associated with growing fan apathy. The athletic department’s projected ticket sales total in its 2026-27 budget was 11.6% lower than the projection for the 2025-26 budget. Fewer fans in the seats can affect other areas of revenue, including alcohol sales.

“It is what it is,” Fickell said of his “hot seat” reality. “If we could avoid it, we would.

“More than anything, I learned that if you’re not authentic about what it is that you’re doing in your leadership, you’re going to struggle. And maybe in the first couple years, I haven’t embraced some of the things that need to be embraced.”

Fickell’s players have fully acknowledged the apparent do-or-die circumstances for their fourth-year head coach.

“We all know it,” Wisconsin wide receiver Chris Brooks Jr. said. “No point in going around it. But I think that is what embodies Coach Fick. That’s what makes him such a great coach because he’s not going to sugarcoat anything.”

That also serves as motivation for Brooks and the rest of the Badgers in 2026.

“We don’t want him gone,” Brooks said. “We love Coach Fick. We think that he is the right person for Wisconsin, but the real reason that he is on the hot seat is because of us. And when you take that accountability and understand that we may be costing a man his job, you go harder.”

Wisconsin’s offensive line consists of some players who Fickell believes “have taken some shots and understand what a hot seat looks like” in their own ways.

He mentioned Colin Cubberly – an offensive lineman who started most games as a redshirt freshman and someone who Fickell is “sure people wrote about that didn’t do a great job.” Emerson Mandell “took a lot of smacks and maybe some criticism,” and Kevin Heywood is coming off a missed season due to a knee injury.

“But you know how you learn in this league or in this world?” Fickell said. “Sometimes you got to get your ass beat a little bit, and sometimes you got to take some shots.”

Wisconsin appears to have a substantially easier schedule in 2026 than it did in 2025.

Four of the Badgers’ 12 opponents in 2025 appeared in the College Football Playoff. While Notre Dame will present a marquee nonconference challenge immediately, only three of UW’s nine Big Ten foes in 2026 had winning conference records in 2025.

Even with that easier schedule, though, turning around a program that has fallen from a streak of 22 consecutive bowl appearances to five and four-win seasons in back-to-back years will not be easy. UW was picked to finish 13th out of 18 Big Ten teams in a preseason poll of USA TODAY NETWORK reporters who cover the conference.

Some people, Fickell said, may suggest that “we can pawn this thing off” and take a potentially easier off-ramp. But the 52-year-old coach instead has adopted a “burn the boats” approach.

“There are people out there that do take some easier ways, and we sure as hell aren’t going to do that,” Fickell said later in the day. “Whether that means you’re on a hotter seat than you were before – I don’t know if it can get much.”

As Fickell tries to work his way off the hot seat in Madison, he at least has a lesson that he can take from when he was in a challenging spot as a head coach in Columbus – and a lesson that he perhaps needed a reminder of earlier in his UW tenure.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin football coach Luke Fickell acknowledges ‘hot seat’ reality