Wisconsin Badgers head coach Luke Fickell had his weekly press conference on Monday, just days after the team’s 37-0 loss to the Iowa Hawkeyes on Saturday.
The Badgers head coach tried to remain optimistic heading into a major weekend against the No. 1 Ohio State Buckeyes, but was faced with several tough questions, and some answers were telling.
Among the questions was whether Fickell looked to meet with the team’s leadership group, which the head coach had said in the preseason was a group that needed to keep this team together.
Days after the humiliating loss, the head coach acknowledged that he hadn’t met with that group and downplayed the importance of those meetings.
“I haven’t met with them just yet,” Fickell said. “I would tell you this, that sometimes sitting with a leadership group isn’t the best way to gauge the pulse of everything that’s going on. Not that they don’t tell you, but it’s still one of those things that’s not the most open.
“But if you’re going through the locker room, watching, sitting, looking, listening, I think that has a lot to do with what we need to be able to do as opposed to just, ‘are they going to tell us everything that they’re thinking, whether it’s a leadership group or not?’ I can sit here and tell you that’s where you don’t feel it. I mean, there’s a difference even to, you know, as we struggled last year, that you felt some things different on the sideline, you saw some things different in the locker room, you heard some things different, whether it was in the locker room or after practice or whatever.
“[Those] guys have done a really good job, continue to push the message of what this is. And so whether they’ve told us exactly how that is. Like, sometimes, by nature, people tell you what you want to hear, but they usually show you what you need to know. And I think that we’ve seen a lot of those things that I think those guys, they continue to promote and push the things that we have stressed. And I mean that in the toughest times. And so, again, it’s been able to communicate with some of those guys, but I think just watching how they react and how they handle the locker room, the things that are being said, the way that guys, you know, come and go, you know, I’m not worried about that. There’s a lot of other things I had to be worried about, stopping Ohio State or defending some of their incredible players or blocking some of their guys. That, to be honest with [you], that’s even more of a concern to me than where we are with the locker room, because I think those guys have done a really good job.”
Wow. That’s a rough statement.
Ahead of the season, Fickell preached how strong the leadership on this team was and noted how important it was for that group to help this team stay the course.
Not meeting with them after such a loss and downplaying the importance of your leadership and the message you’re giving them dictates how Fickell is currently perceived in the locker room.
Fickell also shared that those leadership meetings haven’t been open enough. That’s a huge problem. That environment is where players should be able to voice their concerns and look for some change. That speaks to both a leadership program and the message not sinking through between Fickell and the top brass on the team.
But then, when asked about job security, Fickell said his No. 1 concern is the locker room.
“I don’t know that that’s my position [to talk about job security],” Fickell said. “Right. I mean, first and foremost, I got to make sure that the locker room is the most important thing. I’m not going to change people’s minds outside of the results, obviously. So to go out there and start some campaign of some sorts, like, the truth of the matter is, we got, we got to go game by game. We got to get the guys inside this locker room. That’s what I asked about, right? I mean, like, they could be mad at me, they can be down on me. That’s perfectly fine. But don’t be down on those guys in that locker room. Those guys wear the W.
“The guys that go out there, they can scream and holler if they don’t make a play that they want them to make, but they gotta be able to support them. And I think that’s the most important thing is recognizing what are you really supporting and what do you really love. And, for me to sit here and worry about all those other things, there’s not enough time in the day, there’s not enough energy in the day. So the focus for me and for our staff is on the guys inside that locker room and doing everything we can to make sure that we keep that thing rolling. They’ve got the right mindset. They understand what we got to do, we got to do together, and we got to put our best product out there on Saturday.”
Well, if the goal is focusing on the locker room and getting the guys inside the locker room to unite, meeting with the leadership team and hearing out concerns directly seems like a big step.
Fickell has instead relied on a pre-existing message, which very clearly hasn’t resonated well with the team. There hasn’t been any change over the last four weeks, with this weekend’s loss being the most humiliating.
The head coach has looked to be a bystander and watch from afar while the leadership group works on their own to set the tone. Stopping Ohio State and defending them is certainly important, but that’s impossible to do without a united locker room and a unified leadership group.
While Fickell believes they’ve done a great job, there isn’t really any result that shows that, with players acknowledging that the pattern of beating themselves in back-to-back weeks from last year has carried over now into 2025.
Wisconsin has arguably its two toughest weeks of the season, and the locker room seems divided as ever.