Luke Fickell seems to be anticipating rocky 'cultural changes' at Wisconsin

Wisconsin head football coach Luke Fickell knows how to build a program from the ground up.

He went 4-8 in his first season at Cincinnati before rocketing the Bearcats into the national conversation with a 53-10 record over the next few seasons that included a trip to the College Football Playoff.

That's called building from the ground up, and Fickell is hoping to do the same thing at Wisconsin after a first season that saw the Badgers go 7-6 in 2023.

The Badgers could be in for a major jump on 2024 considering Fickell's track record, but it's telling that the head coach recently tried to quell those expectations.

What he had built at Cincinnati was a bit of an anomaly, perhaps.

“I would love to say you’re gonna have that kind of transition. But, things got to kind of fall in line. And, for us there, they really did,” Fickell told On3. “We had some key players, whether they were great players as young guys or they were great culture guys, they were great guys that helped us build the things that we wanted to be able to do on a daily basis.

“There’s a lot of things that have to go on as you develop and work, and kind of formulate some cultural changes that you have to have a lot of buy in. There’s there’s some specific things that happened in that Year 1 to Year 2 in Cincinnati that gave us that opportunity.”

Fickell does clearly want that type of groundswell of improvement in his second year in Madison, but it does sound like he's thinking it's going to have to come from some fresh faces and fresh perspectives.

“Embracing the things that are different, I think are what’s difficult, and it’s more difficult on the older guys. We kind of had an older team. We kind of had to have those older guys that had to have great years and had to buy in and I think when some of the adversity hit that’s where we ran into some issues," he said of his 2023 team.

“It’s not that it was bad before. It’s just when things are different — how you practice, the expectations you might have — It’s not easy on those guys.”

To Fickell's point, he was largely coaching players brought in by the previous regime led by Paul Chryst. In order to build the culture he wants at Wisconsin — the type of win-at-all-costs culture he built at Cincinnati, it's going to take some time for him to weed out the old and bring in the new.

The good news for Wisconsin fans?

Fickell's first true recruiting class at Wisconsin was ranked top 25 nationally. He also brought in 15 new players via the transfer portal.

Change is coming at Wisconsin. It just may be a bit of a rocky road in the meantime.