Freepik
A box labeled 'Severance Package' with stacks of money, a football and a UW Badgers helmet inside.
Remember when the Badgers football team competed for the Big Ten championship and a trip to the Rose Bowl? If so, your memory would have to go back a few years. Remember when the Badgers lost to a so-so, 20th ranked Michigan team by 14 points and that was considered a moral victory? You’d have to think all the way back to last Saturday for that one. It might be fresher in your mind.
It’s entirely possible that this rendition of Badgers football — the third under coach Luke Fickell — will go winless in the Big Ten and, for the second year in a row, be ineligible for a bowl game. Not even eligible for the Duke’s Mayo Bowl where it’s tradition for the winning coach to be doused in mayonnaise after the game.
You might also remember that when Fickell was hired, Athletic Director Chris McIntosh said he was bringing him in at $7.5 million a year to “compete for national championships.” After two and a half seasons they can’t even compete to get Fickell covered in a condiment.
Now you might think Fickell’s job is on the line and, even more so McIntosh’s after he fired one popular, winning coach in Paul Chryst and passed up on another popular choice in Jim Leonhard to woo Fickell from Cincinnati.
But there’s a catch. Both Fickell and McIntosh have massive golden parachutes. If Fickell were fired today he’d still be owed $29 million just to walk away. If McIntosh were fired he’s in line to get $3.4 million.
And it’s not like this is McIntosh’s only screw up, massive though it is. He was also the guy in charge when — female basketball athletes allege in a lawsuit against the UW — an assistant athletic director failed to act on allegations that their coach had harassed and bullied them.
It’s his athletic department that alienated some of its most loyal fans by taking away their courtside tickets at men’s basketball games and replacing them with premium seats running $775 per game. Never mind that actual attendance at these games is on the decline.
And it’s his management team that had the bright idea of tearing up personalized bricks near the old Shell to make way for a new football practice facility without even informing the donors that their memorials were going to wind up in a dumpster. They retreated on the bricks and now promise that they’ll find another place for them, but it was part of a deadly pattern of arrogance mixed with public relations incompetence.
Meanwhile, bricks or no bricks, track athletes lost the Shell without a replacement facility and McIntosh isn’t communicating about when they might be getting some building of their own. In fact a failure to communicate is a hallmark of McIntosh’s shop. Whenever the local newspapers write about coaches’ salaries they only get the information after filing an open records request. We wouldn’t want the public to know about the compensation packages of public employees after all.
But if we follow the bungling and the wasted money and the line of responsibility we wind up in Bascom Hall and at the desk of Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin. After Fickell’s first dismal season Mnookin inexplicably extended McIntosh’s contract, gave him a big raise and sweetened his buyout.
And, to add insult to injury, both Fickell and McIntosh get automatic pay increases every year regardless of how the team performs. Fickell gets an automatic increase of $100,000 while McIntosh gets $50,000. Both are running the program into the ground, but it doesn't matter. And by the way, Mnookin gets a similar automatic annual increase, though in her case it's called a retention bonus and it's allegedly tied to her performance. This year she'll get $150,000 and that ratchets up to $350,000 in a few years
Part of me asks why we should care. Unless there's some creative accounting going on (and I wouldn't put it past them), the UW athletic program is not subsidized by taxpayers. Football's revenues, supplemented by men's basketball, pay for themselves as well as for all of the other non-revenue sports. Of course, if the take from football drops off, that — combined with new budget pressures created by the need to finally pay players what they're worth — could mean the demise of sports that don't make money, which is most of them. Maybe the solution to not having an indoor practice facility for the track team will be to eliminate the track team.
In truth you could make a pretty good argument that the whole UW athletic program could go away or go down to a lower division and, not only would the world not come to an end, but the university might be better off for it. Harvard, Princeton and Yale still do pretty well without competing for national football titles. What big time team sports have to do with the mission of a major research university has never been clear to me.
That said, I'm enough of a Badgers fan to want the football team to win some games. And it galls the heck out of me that a coach can fail as badly as Fickell has and there's no accountability. In fact, he needs to be paid extravagantly just to leave and get out of the way. Same goes for McIntosh. He staked his career on this hire and it has been a disaster.
The bigger problem here is the lack of moral hazard. Systems don't work when the people with the power never have to pay the price for their failures. That's true for the corner office occupants in corporate America as well. The only people who have their compensation based on performance and find themselves out on the street without a dime in severance if they do a bad job — or even do a good job but get laid off because the CEO ran the place into the turf — are the front line workers. In other words, about 95% of us. We've got a free market system for workers and socialism for the people at the top.
So, when they finally get around to firing Fickell and McIntosh, what should the UW do? Cut the golden parachutes and the automatic pay increases. You get a boost based purely on your performance and if you fail, you lose your job, period. Just like everybody else.
Now, you may argue that that's unrealistic because you need to pay all this money and have these obscenely rich buyouts to attract the best coaches. I have one devastating response to that argument: His name is Luke Fickell.
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, where an earlier version of this piece originally appeared.
