LouisEly

Agree, but I think there is another reason. Someone on the outside is going to look at this and see that a high-profile hire was only given three years and wasn't even given three full recruiting classes to rebuild the program. On top of that, the high-profile hire had to play backup QBs in most of their games because the high-profile transfer QBs they brought (bought?) were injured most of the time. Add to that being a head coach during basically the Wild West of college football with players going to the highest bidder... Is a prospective coach going to feel like he will "get a fair shake" at UW? Is a prospective coach going to feel like there is extra risk in taking the job and will have a really short leash? Increased risk needs to be countered with increased reward. A prospective coach is going to have to really want to come to UW, or is going to need to be paid more to account for the perceived increased risk of a very short leash. You don't get a better job after you get fired. Since UW has never competed for national championships, they will be on the same level as Oklahoma State or Stanford as far as program prestige and then it comes down to security and support. (Stanford's coach was fired after a short period of time, but it was for cause - bullying and belittling female staff members.)

They already have: https://uwbadgers.com/sports/football/roster/staff/marcus-sedberry/983

So did the Packers. They scored on 7 of their 10 possessions and had almost 500 total yards of offense (425 in regulation). The Bears scored on 5 out of 9 possessions (excluding the end of game) and had just under 400 yards of offense. Oh, and the Bears scored 31 points versus the Packers 37 in regulation.

I like how people think it's so easy to call plays in a game where you have about 5 seconds to decide on what play to call with trying to get personnel in and out in time for the opponent to substitute with play clock. They scored on 7 out of their 10 possessions excluding the end of the 1st half, and yet somehow the play caller is a "mental midget".

I think the main reason for why they did what they did is because of Aubrey. He's already hit from 64 this year. If they give Dallas any time, they don't need to get much yardage to give him a chance. As we saw, they didn't need much time to drive the length of the field.

That cheap owner needs to spend some money and go for it!!!

Singed my eyebrows reading the premature hot takes in this thread.

I think you can look at the pitching staffs for the first 46 and last 40 games compared to the middle 76 and come up with a fairly good explanation.

Anecdotally I'm sure this is true. Fickell was hired in late November 2022. The 2023 in-state class, which he didn't have much of a shot at anyway, wasn't good. Nate White was ranked #1 and Will McDonald #2 and they got both of them. The class of 2024 was signed in December of 2023 which means that Fickell likely started recruiting them in 2022 (or earlier) when he was at Cincinnati. That's the main reason why there are few in-state players - they had already built the relationships with out of state kids. From what I've heard, the staff wasn't real high on Sexton, Roy didn't grow up in WI (moved to WI in high school) and was indifferent and they tried to keep him but the history and relationship wasn't there, Corey Smith and Donnie Harbour were indifferent to UW and liked Franklin's "swagger", and they got Jensen (but he left), Rob Booker (medically retired), and Landon Gauthier. You've brought up Leibfried, but he was the #12 player in WI and the #69 OT overall and of the five OL they brought in the lowest ranked one was Cubberly as the #43 OT and he's starting. There just wasn't room for Leibfried with the other five OL they had. As for 2025, Flanigan and Strebig are from Catholic families and went to Catholic schools and when ND comes calling that's like a dream (plus Flanigan is a legacy at ND). Poteat wasn't coming to UW after they fired his dad, but they got Roeske (Wautoma), Grant Dean (Neenah), Cooper Catalano (Germantown, and already playing as a true FR), Torin Pettaway (Middleton), and Emmett Bork (Oconomomoc), so yes, they are giving kids from Wautoma, Neenah, Germantown, and Oconomowoc chances to earn a starting spot. As for 2026, they took Wenzel (Appleton). They weren't going to take many OL having taking a combined 10 in the last two classes. Maybe they missed on Meier, maybe he didn't want to go to a situation where there were 10 guys taken in the two classes ahead of him. Walk-ons are kind of going away with scholarship expansion to 105 and a hard roster limit of 105, so maybe that's why they aren't putting as much effort into a walk-on class.

The 80% buyout might not kick in until after his third year, this year. I've heard that the buyout "drops" to $25M in December, and the payout is then $334K/month through March 2032, or ~$4M/year. That would be offset by any salary he gets in FBS or the NFL. For reference, the Toledo head coach makes $1.1M, so that would only bring Fickell's annual buyout down to ~$3M/year. With $70M+/year in TV revenue, that shouldn't be an issue. The issue is more that if they have to wait until December, will they be able to get a coach in place by signing day and have enough time to sell kids on staying? Being a state employee, they have to follow state law in posting the position, so they can't interview behind his back and have a candidate ready to go the day after they fire him. And with the elimination of the spring portal window, they only have December and early January to bring in players.

Last night ESPN had their 30 for 30 on about "The U Part 2". After the 1994 season, Dennis Erickson left and Butch Davis was hired. Miami's foundation was already crumbling - they were banned from participating in a bowl game in the 1995 season and had 31 scholarships revoked over the next three years - but it hadn't shown up in their record yet. They were 10-2 in 1994. Three years later in 1997, Davis' team went 5-6. Fans were calling for his firing. People hired airplanes to fly over the stadium with banners that said, "From national champs to national chumps". To many fans, Davis "ruined the program". Three years later in 2000, Davis' team went 11-1 and finished #2 in the polls. Obviously a different era, different rules, but lots of similarities. The foundation was crumbling even though it hadn't shown up in the record yet. Didn't bottom out until year 3. Yes, there is the portal and NIL now, but that's no different than recruiting back then - you're still competing with everybody else for recruits, every other big school has NIL and can use the portal too, and many schools have more resources. Sure you can bring guys in via the portal, but they can leave via the portal just as well if they don't like being a backup or if someone comes along and offers more money. Point being, there are examples where it took more than three years to build a program.

Billy Martin is rolling over in his grave.

Fitzpatrick and Murray have been doing their best lately to ensure that they don't get protected or picked.

And they didn't. Losing at home to Tulsa the death knell.

The whole "develop" model that UW was successful with is dead, and for several reasons. It's much harder to find "hidden gems". There's so much more high quality video available on kids now versus ten years ago. From games, from camps, social media. Kids are putting out their own video and tagging coaches, recruiters, columnists for recruiting rating services. The "overlooked" kids now are few and far between. The portal - if a kid feels like they should be starting and they aren't, they hit the portal. (See: Nolan Rucci - he didn't want to sit behind Nelson and Mahlman for another year, so he left). And pretty much every kid who is being recruited by a top school thinks they should be starting (key word - "thinks"). Poaching by schools with bigger NIL funds. (See: Xavier Lucas) If a kid does show something, other schools with bigger budgets come sniffing around. (Or the kid starts putting himself up for auction - I know for a fact that back as early as January agents for kids were reaching out to Greg Gard telling him that if UW was interested their kid would hit the portal after the season was over. There's a ton of that going on.) Some schools have eliminated public access to practices to try to stop "scouts' for other schools from seeing who looks good in practice. Potential walk-ons are taking scholarships elsewhere due to cost of school. With the state of WI funding less and less of tuition and costs at UW, the cost of attending UW has skyrocketed. That, coupled with inflation and the cost of everything going up (housing, vehicles, vehicle insurance - do you know how much it costs to insure a teenager now?) has made it much more financially hard to walk on when they can get scholarships or partial scholarships at a Northern Illinois, Central Michigan, South Dakota State, etc. And, going back to #2 and #3, they think that if they can start earlier at a smaller school and show something then they'll get offered something in the portal. And they usually do. We cannot compare anything of the sport/business of college football today to pre-2020. It's just a completely different landscape, and much of the way things were pre-2020 is dead now.

What a poopy weekend for WI sports teams.

This is such a beautiful picture...

Chryst was a good coach. Until 2020. 2020 allowed him to be lazy, and then he quiet quitted. It is well known that he wasn't fired for his on-field performance; he was fired because he either half-assed or flat out refused to do what he was asked or needed to do off the field. He literally took MONTHS to fill the recruiting coordinator position after he left. He didn't even make it a point to talk to a 4-star linebacker visiting for a game. See my post above about all the talent he had on that 2022 team that only went 7-6.

And most of the good players on that team never played a regular season game for Fickell - Mertz, Herbig, Benton, Tippman, Guerendo. Braelon Allen and Tanor Bortolini played one year. And there was nothing left behind those guys to develop and take over. That 2022 team had Mertz, Herbig, Benton, Tippman, Guerendo, Braelon Allen, Tanor Bortolini, Jack Nelson, Hunter Wohler. And they went 7-6. Nine NFL players should have done better than that. That's on PC and Leonhard.

In the NFL, yes. In college football, if a kid thinks he's good enough to start and he isn't starting, he hits the portal. That's why Rucci left - he didn't want to spend another year sitting behind Nelson and Mahlman. That's why all the DBs left - they demanded to be guaranteed starting spots, and when they were told they don't guarantee anybody anything they left. But it's hard to build depth when the prior regime over the past three years brings in a total of 6 OL recruits (one who got homesick and left, one who's so bad he can't even start this year), 2 TEs (one of whom had a substance abuse issue and quit football, the other isn't even in the 3-deep this year), and 3 DL recruits (one of whom couldn't get admitted). That's the thing, they have to start those relationships 2-3 years before they commit. The guys he was building relationships are freshman now. And what hurt Fickell is that NIL started a year before he left Cincinnati and Cincinnati didn't have the NIL funds to get the top recruits, so there weren't many good recruits he could bring with them. We also know that the chancellor made UW play by the book with respect to NIL. Nothing paid until they got to campus. Lots of other schools were cutting checks up front. Bird in hand... Do I think Fickell is a great coach? No. What I'm saying is that regardless of who they brought in they were headed for disaster.

And those 5th year starters have gotten injured. All three years. That's not rewriting history. As for "the transfer portal", what we don't know is how much UW has had in NIL funds available, how much the QBs they've had to bring in cost (by all accounts, seven figures for an experienced Power 5 starting QB), and how much that leaves them for other positions. And when they have as many holes as they've been left with, they don't have a Phil Knight or a Larry Ellison to give them eight figures to fill out the entire team. And kids in the portal aren't going to go somewhere where they don't think they have an opportunity to start. An OC isn't going to go to UW in the portal because Renfro was there; nobody knew he was going to get hurt. UW was without their starting QB, OC, LT, TE, and they lost their starting RB during the game. No wonder they struggled on offense.

Would be awesome to soak the visitor's clubhouse in Miller High Life

Weren't they supposed to have overtaken the Brewers by now? They're the same distance back that they were 39 day ago.