Freepik assets
A man holding a sign at a football game that says "Shalala save us!"
What I find interesting about college sports these days isn’t what’s happening on the field but in the front office, not what’s going on on the court, but what’s happening in court.
A case in point is the intrigue surrounding the Badgers football program. I don’t need to rehash the ugly details for readers. Suffice it to say that the UW football team finds itself in a bad place. They were shut out for the second week in a row last Saturday, and that hasn’t happened at home since 1980.
It’s obvious that third year coach Luke Fickell has to go, even at a cost of a $28 million contract buyout. Penn State paid James Franklin, a coach with a better record there than Fickell has at the UW, a whopping $49 million just to go away. Yes, it’s obscene, a point I made at some length in my last blog, but what has to happen now is that the UW fires Fickell, eats the buyout, and learns itself a hard lesson: never offer a buyout again.
But despite what seems obvious to fans, the man who can fire Fickell is digging in behind his coach. Athletic Director Chris McIntosh took the unusual step of calling in reporters right after Fickell’s team took it on the chin at home against Maryland, a team that it was thought they could have defeated, to tell the world that he was still all in with the coach. Then Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin followed that up with a statement saying that she was still behind McIntosh, who she has the power to fire.
But things have gotten even worse since then. Wisconsin lost to Michigan and was shut out, 37-0, by Iowa, a team they had been preparing for since training camp. And last Saturday, Ohio State defeated them, 34-0, in a game that wasn’t nearly as close as even that lopsided score would suggest.
A lot of Badgers fans probably thought that McIntosh would pull the plug on Fickell right after that most recent embarrassing loss. Instead, on Sunday a story was leaked reporting that McIntosh had met with the players in a closed door session the week after the Iowa loss to express his continued support for Fickell. He apparently even left some in that room with the impression that their coach would be back next season.
What’s going on? Since the athletic department and McIntosh are anything but forthcoming, let’s do some speculating. That’s a heck of a lot more fun than, say, watching the games.
My guess is that McIntosh is defying gravity here for two reasons. The first is that he staked his reputation and possibly his career on this hire. He’s not going to admit he made a mistake. Instead, he’s going to hang on for as long as he can in the increasingly slim hope that somehow Fickell can turn things around with just a little more time — all evidence to the contrary.
The other reason is that McIntosh knows he must be fired to get his millions of dollars in his own contract buyout. If he were to admit his mistake and resign he wouldn’t get the money. In the upside down world of college sports he only gets the payoff if he’s fired and then only if he’s fired for poor performance. Under the standard terms of these contracts the coach or administrator can only be denied their buyout if they’re fired “for cause.” Unlike the world inhabited by you and me, “cause” does not mean he did a crummy job. It means he did something like harass and demean players — something that one of McIntosh’s former coaches is actually being accused of in a civil lawsuit filed by some women’s basketball players.
It’s possible that he’s waiting for this Saturday’s inevitable rout at the hands of the Oregon Ducks in Eugene before dropping the ax on Fickell. It might be easier to do it when they’re both 2,000 miles away and the Badgers have a bye the next Saturday, so that would give the interim coach two weeks to get adjusted.
But I don’t think so. McIntosh has gone way out on a limb now by going all in behind Fickell twice in a few weeks and in the midst of a horrendous run in which there are no signs of life, much less improvement, from this team. And it doesn’t help that he had expressed total confidence in coach Paul Chryst just before he fired him in the middle of the 2022 season. I would assume that he doesn’t want to develop a reputation as a guy who’s not good to his word.
Fickell could help him out by resigning, but like McIntosh, he can’t do that and still claim his massive buyout. Instead, it appears that he and McIntosh have settled on a narrative. According to the McIntosh/Fickell story, the problem is not that Fickell has failed, but that the recent changes in college sports, including the ability for athletic departments to pay players directly through name, image and likeness deals (a good thing) and the wild west of the transfer portal (a bad thing that could be solved through contracts with players) has made winning a college football game all but impossible. Never mind that, according to The Athletic, 90 other college football teams are better than the Badgers in that environment. Legacy greats like Ohio State, Alabama and Oregon have figured this out as have up-and-comers like Vanderbilt, but somehow Wisconsin just can’t deal with the new reality.
Moreover, and adding to the intrigue, this narrative implies that Badger boosters are the problem. McIntosh and Fickell are strongly suggesting that those boosters haven’t ponied up enough bucks to allow the team to compete for the best talent — while all the while McIntosh keeps harping on the old, dead “student-athlete” myth. At the root of the problem is McIntosh’s inability to deal with NIL and the portal. He stubbornly clings to the “student-athlete” trope while at the very same time trying to throw his boosters under the bus for not coming up with the cash to pay them.
Once this dawns on said boosters they might find themselves less than supportive of the current regime.
So, it’s looking like it may all come down to Chancellor Mnookin. She is no doubt hearing from alumni, from those athletic program boosters (read: rich alumni), and possibly from some former players, embarrassed for their once proud alma mater. It wouldn’t hurt for her to check in with one of her predecessors, Donna Shalala, for some advice. It was Shalala who turned around the football program in 1989 by hiring Pat Richter to run the athletic department. Richter hired Barry Alverez and the rest was history.
In fact, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for Mnookin to replace McIntosh with Shalala on an interim basis, just to right the ship. I might have suggested Barry Alvarez as well, but he has now disappointingly fallen in line with McIntosh. Maybe that’s not surprising since Barry handpicked him as his successor. Alvarez went on his local radio program the other day to say that we should stick with Fickell and by extension McIntosh “until the time comes when you know they can’t get the job done.”
My God, Barry. Fickell’s team has been shut out in two straight games, they’ve lost 10 straight to Power Five opponents and it seems more likely than not that they’ll go winless in the Big Ten this season. Moreover, his record has gotten worse in each of Fickell’s three years. And, finally, the team just looks terrible on the field. What more evidence do we need that this guy isn’t getting the job done?
But it looks like Alvarez chose McIntosh, McIntosh chose Fickell and none of these guys is going to step up and admit they messed up.
Enter Donna Shalala? A move like that would create some real excitement — the kind we’re not seeing on the field.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
