Wisconsin, Luke Fickell playing the long game after offensive growing pains in Year 1

MADISON, Wis. — Luke Fickell isn’t big on social media, so he has managed to avoid the worst of the criticism that followed his inauspicious debut season at Wisconsin.

Still, it didn’t take an assault from the message board army for Fickell to understand the frustrations being expressed at the fish fries and supper clubs around Madison.

For as long as anyone can remember, Wisconsin football was about running the football. It’s a place where “3 yards and a cloud of dust” might as well be a Bible verse — the Book of Barry Alvarez, Chapter 1, Verse 1. But when Fickell took the job last year, he set out to do something different.

“I wanted to be innovative,” Fickell said. “If you really want to win on a continued basis, you have to grow and change.”

Thing is, the Big Ten has not always embraced innovation. While Ohio State has succeeded with a modern offensive attack, much of the rest of the league remains old-school. The Big Ten is a place where punting is an art form and the forward pass is often viewed with the same skepticism as a new cryptocurrency. As the rest of the country has spread the field, added Air Raid concepts to their offensive schemes and given the QB the keys to a Ferrari, the Big Ten has largely remained a run-first (and -second and -third) league — a Jeep made for the long winters of the Upper Midwest.

But change is coming. This season, four schools from the Pac-12 — USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington — all featuring offenses designed after the Reagan administration, will play their first Big Ten games, and like it or not, the rest of the league will have to adjust.

“The conference will evolve with some of these changes,” said USC coach Lincoln Riley, the architect of arguably the most consistently dominant passing attack in college football over the past decade. “The quality of teams coming into this league, there’s going to be an adjustment for everybody.”

Overhauling a system that has worked for so long, however, isn’t exactly a seamless process, as Fickell found out in 2023.

He’d hired Phil Longo from North Carolina, an Air Raid playcaller with no ties to the Big Ten. This wouldn’t just be different. It would be martians landing a spaceship on the 50-yard line at Camp Randall. But the result in Year 1 looked less like a professional makeover and more like New Coke. Wisconsin finished 7-6, threw just 14 touchdown passes all season, and lost conference games to Iowa, Ohio State, Indiana and Northwestern in which the Badgers scored a grand total of 40 points.

So Fickell didn’t need to check his Instagram to find out what fans were thinking. He heard it around town. He heard it on the recruiting trail. Heck, he heard it from the little voice in his head saying the same thing.

“There were times where it’d be fourth-and-1, and we didn’t get it,” Fickell said, “and I’m thinking, ‘S—, if we did it like they’ve been doing it here for the past 25 years, we would’ve gotten it.'”

Longo knew there would be growing pains as he tried to mesh scheme with personnel, but the obstacles Wisconsin faced in Year 1 of this new regime was unlike anything he’d endured in 35 years coaching football, he said. A slew of injuries — to starting quarterback Tanner Mordecai, to his top three tight ends, to his star tailbacks — walloped his depth chart, and the 2023 offense was mostly a makeshift project held together with duct tape and string.

But Fickell is playing the long game here. Change is hard, but he’s certain it’s necessary. He wants to make the College Football Playoff — something Wisconsin has never done, despite posting the ninth-best record of any FBS team during the playoff era — and win a national title, and to do that, the Badgers have to evolve.

Wisconsin is going to throw the ball more.

Wisconsin, the school responsible for a quarter of the 2,000-yard rushers in the FBS during the playoff era, isn’t likely to have another anytime soon.

Wisconsin, one of the most consistent programs in the country for decades, wants to be something new.

In the process, Wisconsin might be offering a window into a new era of Big Ten football. It’s the canary — or the badger — in the coal mine, as the conference prepares for a brave new world of offensive football.

“Now, you say that and Iowa won 10 games [in 2023] being as old-school as possible,” Fickell said. “But I don’t know if you can win on a consistent level if you don’t continue to evolve.”

FICKELL FIRST TRIED to hire Longo as his offensive coordinator in 2017 when he took over as head coach at Cincinnati. Just hours after their initial interview, however, Longo was offered the OC job at Ole Miss — an opportunity he couldn’t turn down. Still, in Fickell, Longo saw a coach with a clear vision, and in Longo, Fickell saw a playcaller willing to innovate. They parted with an understanding that if the stars ever aligned, they wanted to work together.

In the years that followed, the two would trade text messages often — “What do you think about this formation?” or “How would you defend this play?” — and met up annually at a coaches camp Longo hosts in Florida. The back-and-forth pushed both in new directions.

Then Fickell took the Wisconsin job, and his first order of business was simple: evolving from tradition. So he called Longo.

“They hired Fick to make a change,” Longo said, “and this is part of that change.”

Wisconsin’s new approach to offense isn’t the Big Ten’s first foray into a wide-open attack. Drew Brees broke passing records at Purdue 25 years ago. But while there are exceptions to the rule — most notably, Ohio State — the numbers tell the story of a league that, for better or worse, has stayed true to its roots as the rest of college football has veered toward something new.

Ohio State has averaged more than 41 points per game in the playoff era and posted a Big Ten-best 115-15 record. The rest of the league has approached things differently. As a group, the other 13 Big Ten teams have averaged just 26 points per game over the past 10 years, with Iowa, Illinois, Northwestern and Rutgers among the lowest-scoring programs in college football in that span.

In the playoff era, the Big Ten ranks last among Power 5 leagues in scoring (25.4 points per game in conference play) and plays per game (68.5) and has the highest rate of designed runs (51%). Only four Big Ten teams (Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State and Wisconsin) rank among the top 45 in conference-game scoring in the Power 5. Half of the bottom 10 comes from the Big Ten.

The Big Ten accounts for seven of the eight teams with the lowest offensive expected points added among power conference schools in league play. Of the 50 lowest-scoring individual seasons over the past 10 years, half were teams from the Big Ten. No league throws deep less often (13.4% of pass attempts in conference play), punts as frequently or chews up more clock between plays. And last season, half of the conference — Penn State, Rutgers, Michigan State, Indiana, Northwestern, Wisconsin and Iowa — ranked 100th or worse in explosive play rate on pass plays.

From a philosophy standpoint, the Big Ten isn’t a league that goes five wide or views its short passing game as an extension of the run game. While the Mike Leach coaching tree has stretched into nearly every facet of college football, until 2023 the only branch in Big Ten country was a two-year stint for Seth Littrell as playcaller at Indiana more than a decade ago. For a sizable portion of the Big Ten, any problem can be solved with five simple words: power run up the middle.

And none of this is inherently bad. The Big Ten’s defenses routinely rank among the best in the nation. Of the 11 Power 5 teams to win at least nine games while averaging fewer than 26 points per game, eight are Big Ten programs. Michigan won a national title last year with a first-round draft pick at QB who completed just 10 passes in the championship game win over Washington.

“People want to win, and they know the best way to win is to build around what they can get,” Fickell said. “If you’re Iowa, that just might mean they’re bigger and more physical guys, and they don’t get as many of the skill athletes. That’s where it’s always been in the Big Ten.”

But why has it always been that way? And is the Big Ten destined to keep following that same blueprint?

“Why hasn’t there been a lot of points scored? Why don’t you see the ball in the air as much? How much of it has to do with weather?” said Jedd Fisch, who’ll lead Washington into the Big Ten this season and who spent two years as quarterbacks coach at Michigan in 2015 and 2016. “It’s clearly harder to throw the ball in November in Minnesota than November in Tucson.”

Of course, the harsh weather of the Midwest is a challenge for high schools, too, which translates into a different recruiting pool.

Big Ten country has been known as a hotbed for big bodies — stout tailbacks and hulking O-linemen — while suffering a dearth of skill talent. The schools, as a result, have built their offenses around the raw material available to them.

“You see more speed recruited in California, Florida and Texas, and you see more size in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan,” Fisch said. “Then it’s a matter of how far outside your recruiting comfort zone are you comfortable going to recruit the opposite. You’ve got to be willing to go everywhere if you’re trying to recruit that type of skill.”

That’s the common refrain anyway.

Wisconsin offensive line coach A.J. Blazek grew up in Kansas and played at Iowa. He’s the prototypical Big Ten recruit, a self-described “glue guy” who is big and strong and pretty slow. But he has been recruiting as an assistant coach for 20 years, and he thinks the skill guys in the Midwest are there — they’re just not on the football field.

“You go south, and what I learned from my time in the SEC — they do 7-on-7 like we play AAU basketball,” Blazek said. “It’s nonstop. The skill kids are here, but you have to find them on a basketball court.”

It also might be something of a self-fulfilling philosophy. The colleges prioritize big bodies and power runners, so the better athletes look to go elsewhere. That’s part of what convinced Fickell it was time for a change. Wisconsin wants NFL-caliber players at every position on the depth chart, but it can’t lure elite quarterbacks and receivers by playing old-school football.

Just look at Ohio State, the exception to every Big Ten rule over the past 20 years. The Buckeyes have played a wide-open offense, and they’ve recruited exceptional talent on the line of scrimmage and at the skill positions. They’ve pulled big men from the Midwest and receivers from Florida and California. They do it all, so they can recruit anyone. They recruit everyone, so they can do it all. It’s a self-referential blueprint that Wisconsin wants to follow, too.

Longo’s offense wasn’t an overwhelming hit on the field in Year 1, but he also has a résumé that includes coaching Sam Howell, Drake Maye, D.K. Metcalf and A.J. Brown. That sells on the recruiting trail, and this past year, Wisconsin added four-star QB Mabrey Mattauer from Texas and lured Miami QB Tyler Van Dyke via the portal.

“I think there was a belief they didn’t have the ability to recruit receivers or quarterbacks because of what they did on offense,” Longo said. “We’ve opened up the offense, and quarterback recruiting has gone really well, and receiver recruiting is through the roof right now. I don’t know that I’ve experienced any more lack of interest now than I did at North Carolina. At the end of the day, what you do offensively, that’s what they’re interested in.”

WISCONSIN OFFENSIVE GUARD Joe Brunner is technically from Milwaukee, but he might as well be from central casting. On an April afternoon inside Camp Randall, he has just wrapped up a workout. His scraggly beard is matted with sweat, his legs are like tree trunks anchoring him to the ground, and his bare arms hang from a tattered cut-off tee shirt that struggles to conceal a belly that seems scientifically designed to provide the ideal center of gravity in any one-on-one battle with a pass rusher.

This is what Big Ten football is supposed to look like.

“It’s essential to have a big beard,” Brunner said. “Maybe a mullet, too. Get it all lined up.”

And yet, here is Brunner, eagerly lining up on the line of scrimmage for an Air Raid offense.

He’s supposed to be mean and ugly and nasty. He’s not a finesse guy. What gives?

“We’re still running power, we’re still running inside zone,” Brunner said. “We’re still doing the things offenses that aren’t Air Raid are doing, so our nastiness on the offensive line allows us to do so much.”

Perhaps this is the true end game of this new era of Big Ten football — not so much a full transition into Big 12-style passing attacks, but a blend of flavors that mixes the intricate design of Riley’s USC with the brute force of Iowa’s power run game.

This is a metaphor that resonates with Longo, who loves to cook in his free time. The goal at Wisconsin isn’t about switching from fried cheese to crudités. It’s about expanding the cookbook to include enough recipes to suit any craving and acquire enough ingredients to create any flavor.

When Longo installed his version of the Air Raid at Sam Houston State, the school was transitioning from a triple-option attack, so he ran the ball a ton. At Ole Miss, he had Metcalf and Brown, so they lined up four wide often. At North Carolina, the receiver room was a work in progress, but he had a star QB and two tailbacks who’d go on to be drafted. Both ran for more than 1,000 yards.

“It sounds like a negative connotation when you say this is my system, like you’re stubborn or only recruit to this system,” Longo said. “The system should be multiple enough to utilize the talent you have.”

It’s a common refrain among the disruptors of the Big Ten. They’re not so different, really. Fisch notes that at Arizona last season, his QB was under center more than any Big Ten team but Iowa. Riley points out that during his tenure at Oklahoma, they ran the ball better than nearly anyone.

It’s possible, too, that the arrival of USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington actually opens some new recruiting inroads for the existing Big Ten teams to help diversify their talent, and the transfer portal has certainly made national recruiting more universal.

If the Big Ten’s offensive identity was tied up in regionality before, then the future stretches from coast to coast.

“The world is getting smaller for different reasons,” Fickell said. “The portal, NIL — the reach is much further because guys in their second or third year are going places, sometimes, for different reasons than when they were 17 or 18.”

That’s exciting, Riley said. New teams, new coaches, new players, new schemes — it’s a challenge and, in a way, an adventure. He doesn’t see USC as a conquering army that has come to bring offense to Iowa, just as Longo isn’t trying to reinvent the (cheese) wheel at Wisconsin. They’re learning as they go, and they’re eager to see how both sides of this new relationship evolve.

As the Mike Leach diaspora finally reaches Big Ten country, there’s no guarantee that the pieces all fit. Wisconsin just wants to throw the ball a bit more and, for better or worse, Iowa may punt a bit less. It’s a new era, yes, but each program will be mapping its own path forward.

“It won’t be the same as we grow, but it’s certainly different than what they’ve had here,” Fickell said. “You have to believe in what you’re doing and what you’re growing into and know there’s going to be some bumps in the road.”

Bumps are to be expected. The old guard doesn’t collapse under the weight of one or two new ideas. But keep chipping away, and eventually, the facade looks brand new.

That’s not just the vision at Wisconsin. It’s a belief, held as firmly as any old ethos about 3 yards and dust.

“I have zero concern,” Longo said. “If I thought for one second it couldn’t work here, I wouldn’t have come.”