Meet New Wisconsin FB Coach Luke Fickell

[GBP4EVER]

Should this be a guy Fickell is calling to get to UW?

Sources: Texas QB Card to enter transfer portal

Texas QB Hudson Card, a redshirt sophomore with three years of eligibility remaining, intends to enter the transfer portal, sources told ESPN.

www.espn.com

 

[TW]

Should this be a guy Fickell is calling to get to UW?

Sources: Texas QB Card to enter transfer portal

Texas QB Hudson Card, a redshirt sophomore with three years of eligibility remaining, intends to enter the transfer portal, sources told ESPN.

www.espn.com

He'd probably be an upgrade over Mertz. But, I don't see him leaving this area. He'll hook up with a team down here in the South.

 

[Keg Man]

I can't see how Leonhard sticking around will benefit Fickell's Badgers.



As far as recruiting in WI, I'll give you that Leonhard could help. However, no WI home is going to close its door to Bucky regardless of who is coach. That does not mean every one will choose WI, but the door will open and they'll talk.



So, I can't see Leonhard sticking around being a benefit to Fickell. I think he's probably getting forced into this offer.



And, I can't see how sticking around can benefit Leonhard.



It's best for both to have a clean break.

 

[TW]

I can't see how Leonhard sticking around will benefit Fickell's Badgers.



As far as recruiting in WI, I'll give you that Leonhard could help. However, no WI home is going to close its door to Bucky regardless of who is coach. That does not mean every one will choose WI, but the door will open and they'll talk.



So, I can't see Leonhard sticking around being a benefit to Fickell. I think he's probably getting forced into this offer.



And, I can't see how sticking around can benefit Leonhard.



It's best for both to have a clean break.

You're probably right.

 

[Mark87]

I can't see how Leonhard sticking around will benefit Fickell's Badgers.



As far as recruiting in WI, I'll give you that Leonhard could help. However, no WI home is going to close its door to Bucky regardless of who is coach. That does not mean every one will choose WI, but the door will open and they'll talk.



So, I can't see Leonhard sticking around being a benefit to Fickell. I think he's probably getting forced into this offer.



And, I can't see how sticking around can benefit Leonhard.



It's best for both to have a clean break.

You keep missing the backstory which was posted several times, He and Kate have property outside of town that is for lack of a better word their treasure, he turned down the Packers partly because of that factor. His love for UW, Kate and that property can't be overstated.

Why the hell wouldn't you want to make 1.1 million next year, hang out at the school you love with kids that think the world of you, and go home to that property every day?? You're making an assumption that he's into being a career HC and to be honest, he could easily walk away from all of it rather than leave that area. Yes, from everything I've read and heard it's that big of a deal to him and Kate.

 

[TW]

You keep missing the backstory which was posted several times, He and Kate have property outside of town that is for lack of a better word their treasure, he turned down the Packers partly because of that factor. His love for UW, Kate and that property can't be overstated.

Why the hell wouldn't you want to make 1.1 million next year, hang out at the school you love with kids that think the world of you, and go home to that property every day?? You're making an assumption that he's into being a career HC and to be honest, he could easily walk away from all of it rather than leave that area. Yes, from everything I've read and heard it's that big of a deal to him and Kate.

I'm still afraid he's going to leave. I'm going to estimate 50-60% chance he takes on a coaching challenge elsewhere. His coaching value couldn't get much higher than it is now.

But, if he does, it's only to wait out Luke's time as Wisconsin HC. I think he'd be planning on coming back to Wisconsin, as the HC, after he gains more experience in the areas of running a program.

But, that's just my opinion.

 

[Mark87]

What Luke Fickell brings to Wisconsin, why he fits Badgers: ‘A mirror image of him’​

Steve Stripling was winding down a 40-year career as a college football coach when he returned to Cincinnati in 2018 to lead the Bearcats’ defensive line in his final season before retirement. Luke Fickell, in his second season as head coach there, was coming off a 4-8 campaign with a team that ranked among the bottom in the American Athletic Conference at 2-6. Yet what Stripling remembers upon his arrival was how upbeat and ambitious Fickell was with one overarching motto: We will play for championships.


Stripling had been around the sport long enough to hear plenty of coaches issue similar directives. But there was something about Fickell’s day-to-day steadiness, honesty with players and coaches and focused approach that made him a believer even though the Bearcats weren’t champions of anything.

“A lot of people go into a new job and they set these goals and they never get there,” Stripling said. “I think he just never loses sight of, ‘That’s where we’re going.’ You have some high points, you’ve got some low points and you just keep grinding it out. We’re going to play for championships, and you recruit your butt off.”

There were no eye rolls from players at the time. They craved competition and improvement. Fickell, who once went 106-0 over three seasons as a high school wrestler and started 50 consecutive games at nose guard for Ohio State, was going to give it to them.

No detail in that quest was too small. During Fickell’s first season at Cincinnati, Navy’s triple-option rushing attack steamrolled his team for 569 yards in a 42-32 victory. That result particularly irked Fickell, given his defensive background. Stripling said Fickell and the staff spent hours and hours studying and making strategic adjustments during the offseason. When the teams met in the 2018 rematch, all that preparation allowed Cincinnati to hammer Navy 42-0 by holding the Midshipmen to 124 yards rushing.

By the end of that season, Cincinnati had won 11 games. Two years later, the Bearcats won the AAC championship. A year after that, they became the first Group of 5 school to reach the College Football Playoff. It happened because of a coach who never settled for complacency at the first sign of success and delivered a consistent message to generate buy-in from players.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when Fickell spoke Monday night at the news conference introducing him as Wisconsin’s next football coach, what he said could have been culled from a conversation in 2017, 2019 or 2022. The goal remains the same, and he will put every ounce of energy into reaching it.


“I’ll tell you this and you’ll probably hear it for every year at the beginning of the year,” Fickell said. “We’ve got one objective and one goal and it’s to play for a championship. I said that obviously when I started at Cincinnati, and that is open-ended. But it gives you a lot of flexibility in the things you do. You have an opportunity in this league, if you’re playing for a championship, amazing things can happen. I think you’ve just got to stay focused to know that’s what it comes down to.”

Wisconsin hasn’t won a Big Ten championship since 2012 and has yet to break through into the College Football Playoff. The hiring of 49-year-old Fickell is a move that signifies the Badgers want more. Why is Fickell the man to help Wisconsin get over that hump? Here are some key reasons, according to people who have worked closely with him over the years.

Recruiting prowess​

Ohio State coach Jim Tressel hired Fickell as special teams coordinator and an assistant on the defensive line in 2002 after Fickell spent one season as a graduate assistant with the Buckeyes and two as a defensive line coach at Akron. Tressel said he liked Fickell’s energy and admired his intelligence and ability to quickly learn from his peers. But it became clear early that one of Fickell’s greatest strengths was his ability to connect with people. And that made him a tremendous recruiter.

“Wherever he recruited for us, he was effective,” Tressel said. “For instance, he had Western Pennsylvania, and we got some of the best kids out of there. He had Georgia, and we got some great kids out of Georgia. He had parts of Florida. Of course, he had parts of Ohio. But I could send him into Maryland and he’d never been to Maryland. Boom, he’d have relationships. You could send him into Georgia or Chicago. It didn’t matter.

“I don’t think it will matter where he is because I think the student-athletes and their parents, as important as anything, will feel the trust and the genuineness and they’ll have confidence in him once they get to know him. Something else that he has that is a plus in this day and age, he’s got a little bit of youth. He’s not walking in there with gray hair and whiskers. I think the kids will look at him and say, ‘You know, he probably played.’ But recruiting is clearly one of his strong suits.”


During Fickell’s time as an assistant coach at Ohio State, he was responsible for generating commitments from and signing — either as the primary or secondary recruiter — 37 four- or five-star prospects, according to the 247Sports database. Yet perhaps what is even more impressive is the way Fickell won at Cincinnati without those types of players because of his ability to identify talent that would fit a scheme.

Cincinnati ranked first in the AAC in recruiting four times over the past five recruiting cycles under Fickell. During that stretch, the Bearcats signed zero five-star players, nine four-star players and 95 three-stars.

Wisconsin’s recruiting efforts have stalled the past couple of years, first as former coach Paul Chryst went eight months without filling out his recruiting department and then as five prospects in the 2023 class decommitted amid coaching uncertainty following Chryst’s firing. Fickell’s understanding of the importance of recruiting — he said Monday that two key recruiting staffers from Cincinnati already were on the way to Wisconsin — and the manner in which he values relationships that are required to maintain key pipelines help to set him apart.

“He’s a tireless recruiter,” Stripling said. “He’s on the phone all the time with the kids. As a staff, it was an importance obviously — and it has to be in today’s world. To me, he’s just a down to earth, straight-ahead guy that kids c
Ted Ginn Sr. has been a coach at Glenville High School in Cleveland since 1976 and the head coach there since 1997. One of his former players, cornerback Coby Bryant, was a lightly recruited high school prospect. Coaches and recruiting evaluators couldn’t see on tape what Ginn knew.

If a coach could stop Bryant from being overconfident in his athletic ability and make him more fundamentally sound, Ginn said, he was going to be a difference-maker. Fickell and then-defensive coordinator Marcus Freeman believed in Ginn’s assessment and took a chance. Bryant developed into the Jim Thorpe Award winner for nation’s best defensive back in 2021.

“Everywhere he goes, he’s been able to have I would say the Jim Tressel-type recruiting style of selling things and making the university and football important to their life,” Ginn said of Fickell. “So I think that’s going to set him different. He’ll be able to sell Wisconsin to people. You can’t win games and be successful like that unless you have the right ingredients as a coach to make kids believe, teach them how to believe first and learn later.”

Former Ohio State linebacker Bobby Carpenter, whose position coach for two years was Fickell, said Fickell’s approach at Wisconsin likely will be similar to what he achieved at Cincinnati. Fickell said Monday the core of Wisconsin’s recruiting efforts would focus on a 300-mile radius from campus. Although Wisconsin isn’t a program that thrives on landing five-star prospects, it can succeed under Fickell because he wants players with the right attitude and toughness to build on the culture first established under Badgers Hall of Fame coach Barry Alvarez.

“I think that he’ll be able to recruit the Midwest,” said former Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio, who was Ohio State’s defensive coordinator when Fickell was hired there. “When he was at Ohio State as an assistant, this was early on, he was one of our best recruiters because he could connect with players.

“I think Wisconsin is a national brand that you can go into Ohio, you can go East Coast, you can go into Michigan, you can go everywhere in the Midwest, into Chicago. And then you can go to Florida. You can go national. He’s been a guy that has been able to do that at Ohio State and flipped the script a little bit at Cincinnati and went primarily in a four-hour radius but was very successful and got good players.”

Coaching and player development/buy-in​

Carpenter saw up close the type of coach and leader Fickell was in 2004, when Fickell moved to linebackers coach despite never having been in charge of the position before. He vowed to learn as much about coverage as he could and spent hours studying, just as he did to combat Navy’s rushing attack years later at Cincinnati.

But Fickell knew that his background on the defensive line would allow him to teach linebackers how to get off blocks, and that became a primary focus with a veteran linebacker unit that included Carpenter and A.J. Hawk — both first-round NFL Draft picks — as well as future third-rounder Anthony Schlegel.

“He helped me immensely just working through that and making sure that we can get off blocks and shed and strike and the hand placement, the technique and leverage,” Carpenter said. “… He’s like, ‘I can share this with you.’ He did a great job of coaching through the technique, making sure we understood it, working with it every day. It was not to say I’m going to show it to you, then walk away. You are what you emphasize. So we worked on it all the time and we got very proficient at it, and that was a testament to him.”
an relate to. Whatever their background, he doesn’t change for your background. He is who he is. I think kids appreciate that.”
Carpenter acknowledges he wasn’t the easiest player for a coach to handle. He said there were times when he and Fickell would engage in screaming matches. What he respects to this day is that he knew Fickell always had his best interests at heart with a refreshing level of sincerity. Carpenter said Fickell convinced him during his senior year to be a hybrid standup outside linebacker to rush the quarterback off the edge on third down and in nickel packages. Those conversations helped Carpenter become a more well-rounded NFL player.

“He’s very honest with everything,” Carpenter said. “He’s a very likable person but he’s very genuine. He’s not a bull-crapper. He’ll tell you, ‘Hey, this is what we think you can do. Here’s your pathway to the field.’”

Fickell has been able to build bonds with players based on three pillars, which he shared with Wisconsin’s team during initial meetings and reiterated Monday: trust, respect and love. He said that he told players, many still reeling from interim coach Jim Leonhard not earning the full-time job, that change in life is inevitable, growth is optional and that the things that are easy don’t last. Fickell’s hope is to change alongside his players as he invests in their growth on and off the field.

“He’s very serious,” Tressel said. “His players will know where he stands. But they’ll also know that he stands right with them.”

Tressel said Fickell’s investment in his players involves a holistic approach. Expectations and accountability will be high because that’s what Fickell demands. He already has plans to maximize player development in the weight room. Fickell is expected to bring with him Cincinnati strength coach Brady Collins, who has been instrumental in transforming players’ bodies before they hit the field. No aspect of the college experience for his players figures to go unnoticed.

“He has connectivity to the players,” Dantonio said. “But I also think he does a great job of handling adversity. I’ve always thought you’re going to be defined about how you handle the problems that come to you. Everybody at that position as a head football coach is going to have problems at some point in time, whether it’s on the field, off the field, in the classroom. When I’ve talked to him in certain situations where they’ve had some difficult situations, he was always upbeat and always could handle it and always had a plan to resolve the issues.”

Competitiveness and loyalty​

Stripling said Fickell’s decision to leave Cincinnati wasn’t an act of not being loyal to a program. As Stripling put it: “He stayed as long as he could.” In fact, Fickell stayed longer than many other coaches might have, given the opportunities that existed. There were job openings last season at football powerhouses USC, LSU, Notre Dame and Oklahoma. But Fickell didn’t want to entertain offers during the season because he was committed to the team during Cincinnati’s Playoff run.

This year, the timing was right after Cincinnati was eliminated from conference title contention Friday. Fickell, who has never taken a coaching job outside Ohio, was ready for a new challenge and opportunity, having pushed Cincinnati about as far as it could go. He said Wisconsin was among a short list of schools he would even consider.
It is a decision he is making with long-term implications in mind, given that he has been at only two schools over the past 20 years. He has a wife, Amy, and six kids, five of whom attended his introductory news conference (his oldest son, Landon, is an offensive lineman at Cincinnati). They will begin to establish roots in Madison, and Fickell said his family would be an integral part of the program.

“If a coach can go to Wisconsin, that’s pretty special,” Tressel said. “I had some conversations with him last week. It’s very difficult for him to be totally immersed in his own team there at Cincinnati and then having to entertain the thoughts. He’s been going through this for four or five years, people trying to convince him to go here and there and everything.

“But, boy, when it became Wisconsin, that’s a whole different deal. I think he has such respect for the Badgers and what they stand for and how they’ve been successful. It’s kind of a mirror image of him. There’s no question in his mind about this one.”

Tressel said Fickell’s biggest challenge is the time it will take to build relationships so that everyone understands his vision for the Badgers’ future. When that happens, he said Wisconsin can play with any team in the country. Fickell is familiar with the Big Ten landscape, having coached at Ohio State for 15 years, and sees great potential in what Wisconsin can be. Wisconsin isn’t the sleeping giant Alvarez built from scratch. It has approached the mountaintop but needs another push to get there. Fickell believes he can be the one to provide it.

“They have a strong foundation, they’re used to winning and their expectations are high,” Dantonio said. “I guess you’d say there is a high ground floor.”

Coaches say Fickell doesn’t do anything if he’s not all in. He is coming to Wisconsin to invest in the program, the university and the people. And he won’t settle for anything less than the championship vision he laid out from Day 1.

“The beauty of Luke is that I don’t care if it’s a tiddlywinks game, he wants to win,” Tressel said. “I don’t care if it’s a card game. I don’t care if it’s a wrestling match, if it’s a football game. There will be nothing in his mind other than winning and winning the right way and winning with the players’ well-being in mind and the connectivity with the community.”

 

[FlaPack]

You keep missing the backstory which was posted several times, He and Kate have property outside of town that is for lack of a better word their treasure, he turned down the Packers partly because of that factor. His love for UW, Kate and that property can't be overstated.

Why the hell wouldn't you want to make 1.1 million next year, hang out at the school you love with kids that think the world of you, and go home to that property every day?? You're making an assumption that he's into being a career HC and to be honest, he could easily walk away from all of it rather than leave that area. Yes, from everything I've read and heard it's that big of a deal to him and Kate.

For the record he also turned down 2 or 3 other P5 DC jobs with higher profile names for the same reasons

 

[Budman]

What Luke Fickell brings to Wisconsin, why he fits Badgers: ‘A mirror image of him’​

Beautiful article and it captures the essence of Luke Fickell. UW made a great hire and I'll say it again, I, as well as many many others in this area, will miss Coach Fick. I'm glad he went to the Badgers and I can't wait to see what he builds!

 

[FlaPack]

Beautiful article and it captures the essence of Luke Fickell. UW made a great hire and I'll say it again, I, as well as many many others in this area, will miss Coach Fick. I'm glad he went to the Badgers and I can't wait to see what he builds!

The next 10 days go 2 weeks are going to be critical. Getting the staff aboard, portal window begins 12/6 and then early signing day 12/21.