Wisconsin Athletics
Fickell at a press conference with Flying W motif wallpaper behind him.
@CoachFick has had a busy couple months on social media, if not the gridiron.
When Luke Fickell flew into Madison on Nov. 27 to be introduced as the new University of Wisconsin football coach, fans scrambling to find out if the erstwhile University of Cincinnati coach had any kind of internet presence were pleased to discover his @CoachFick account on Twitter.
The account is devoid of hot takes and trash talk — or much of anything entertaining — but for a crowd forced to endure the social media apathy and boring press conferences of Paul Chryst, fired as the Badgers coach in early October, for seven-and-a-half years, any sign of a coach participating in modern online discourse was intriguing.
Just a couple weeks later, Fickell started subtly but frequently breaking news. On 13 occasions between Dec. 12 and Jan. 13, he tweeted the hashtag “#OnWisconsin” accompanied by a brief video imploring fans to “Get ready to jump around!” with scenes from a sunny game day at Camp Randall Stadium. Those tweets were followed, usually within an hour, by retweets of young players announcing they were transferring to Wisconsin from schools like Oklahoma, USC and Mississippi State.
This activity created buzz among fans and had sportswriters chasing stories at all hours.
Fickell’s ability to grab players from other teams is due to the transfer portal, a wrinkle introduced to college sports in 2018 that allows athletes to switch schools without having to sit out a year or lose any eligibility. His aggressive approach is a stark contrast to Chryst, who went eight months without a recruiting staff in 2021, according to a report in The Athletic shortly after he was fired.
“It’s been invigorating as a reporter who covers the team to see the level of excitement that the fans have [about Fickell’s moves],” Jesse Temple, who covers the Badgers for The Athletic, said on the Jan. 13 episode of The Camp podcast. “And it makes it more fun. College sports are about passion, college football certainly is, and Luke Fickell and his staff have generated it in spades.”
This positive energy comes after a season that included home losses to Washington State, Illinois and, perhaps worst of all, Minnesota. While perhaps not calling for full-scale regime change, fans were showing their disapproval of the direction of the program by staying home on game day.
According to a Jan. 20 report from Todd Milewski in the Wisconsin State Journal, the 2022 season saw an average of 15,214 no-shows for home games, topping 20 percent for the first time since ticket scan data became available in 2006. Milewski frequently reports on ticket scans, a more accurate measure of fan interest than ticket sales.
If you don’t count the Guaranteed Rate Bowl victory over Oklahoma State on Dec. 27, Fickell hasn’t won anything at Wisconsin yet or put butts in seats. We have only the players he has recruited — and assistant coaches he’s hired — to use in evaluating him so far, and even that is speculative. But he has a lot of us looking forward to spring practice, something that hasn’t happened in a long time.
