<\/p>\n
Wisconsin athletic director Shawn Eichorst, right, shakes hands with Interim Chancellor Eric Wilcots at an introductory news conference on Tuesday July 7, 2026 in Madison, Wis.<\/p>\n
AP Photo\/<\/p>\n
Wisconsin athletic director Shawn Eichorst, right, speaks at his introductory news conference while sitting next to interim chancellor Eric Wilcots on Tuesday July 7, 2026 in Madison, Wis.<\/p>\n
AP Photo\/<\/p>\n
MADISON, Wis. (AP) \u2014 New Wisconsin athletic director Shawn Eichorst, who spent the last eight years at Texas, believes his new and old schools have much in common.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Both are well-regarded research universities in state capitals that belong to major conferences and have relatively similar enrollments.<\/p>\n
Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n
He also pointed out one difference.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s swag at Texas, right?\u201d Eichorst said Tuesday during his introductory news conference. \u201cThere\u2019s 30 million people in Texas. We\u2019ve got swag, too, but we have a little humility with that deal. We need to get our shoulders up. We need to feel good about what it is that we\u2019re doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wisconsin could gain more of that Texas swagger if its football program gets back to winning the way it did the last time Eichorst was employed in Madison. Eichorst, who most recently worked as a deputy athletic director at Texas, received a five-year deal worth $1.6 million annually, not including incentives. He was hired 2\u00bd months after Chris McIntosh left to become the Big Ten\u2019s deputy commissioner for strategy.<\/p>\n
Eichorst worked at Wisconsin from 2006-11 when Barry Alvarez was AD and Bret Bielema was leading the football program. He followed that up with stints as an athletic director at Miami (2011-12) and Nebraska (2012-17) before Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte hired him in 2018.<\/p>\n
Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n
He returns to Wisconsin with the Badgers coming off back-to-back losing seasons in football, a notable fall for a program that had 22 straight winning seasons from 2002-23. Wisconsin coach Luke Fickell has gone 17-21 after posting a 53-10 record with one College Football Playoff appearance in his last five years at Cincinnati.<\/p>\n
Eichorst hasn\u2019t worked with Fickell before but said he\u2019s encouraged by their initial conversations.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously he\u2019s won every place he\u2019s been,\u201d Eichorst said. \u201cMy expectation is more of me than him, meaning I need to pour into him, learn more about his program, how he has things set up, how his athletes are taken care of, how we\u2019re supporting that endeavor. And then we can figure out, as we move along, what that might look like.\u201d<\/p>\n
Football struggles led to Eichorst\u2019s downfall the last time he was an athletic director.<\/p>\n
Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n
He fired Nebraska coach Bo Pelini in 2014 and hired Mike Riley, who had gone 93-80 in 14 seasons at Oregon State. Eichorst was dismissed shortly after Nebraska suffered an early-season loss to Northern Illinois in 2017. Riley was fired at the end of that season after going 19-19 in three years.<\/p>\n
When Eichorst\u2019s hiring was announced last week, he spoke about how much he had grown from that Nebraska stint. Wisconsin interim chancellor Eric Wilcots led the search and has emphasized Eichorst\u2019s accomplishments at Texas, which has won the Learfield Directors\u2019 Cup<\/a> all-sports standings five times in the last six years.<\/p>\n Texas ranked anywhere from fifth to ninth in the Directors\u2019 Cup standings in the five years before Wilcots\u2019 arrival. Texas\u2019 football team went a combined 23-27 from 2014-17 but has made two College Football Playoff appearances in the last three years.<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody looks at the end result of what we did at Texas,\u201d Eichorst said. \u201cWhen we got there in 2018, we weren\u2019t very good in a lot of areas. And that didn\u2019t change overnight.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Eichorst said one thing that has caught his attention about Wisconsin is the overall quality of its head coaches.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re going to be as good as your coaches,\u201d Eichorst said. \u201cThat\u2019s it. If you have an elite group of coaches who are working together and uniting and galvanizing and learning from one another and taking it out to their individual programs, I think you can start to build something special. I go back to Texas. We built a room of really elite head coaches and put them at the top of everything we did to help guide us.\u201d<\/p>\n Eichorst said this job is particularly important to him because of his Wisconsin roots. He was born in Lone Rock, about 45 miles northwest of the Madison campus.<\/p>\n He treasured his previous stint at Wisconsin and says he believes this school \u201crepresents everything that is great about higher education and college athletics.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cNobody will work harder for Wisconsin athletics,\u201d Eichorst said. \u201cI love this state, and I love everything that it represents. The passion is there. You can see it. I don\u2019t have to make it up. I\u2019ve lived it. It\u2019s in my heart.\u201d<\/p>\n