At least they covered, right? No, that's not what anyone who supports Wisconsin football should be thinking following the 24-10 loss to Michigan on the road. Instead, what a lot of people are talking about is that Luke Fickell continues to make absurd mistakes.
Such was the case late against the Wolverines. Fickell had all three of his timeouts, but he didn't use a single one with his team down two scores and a little over two minutes left on the clock. In a perfect world, the Wisconsin defense would have recorded a stop and gotten the ball back for Hunter Simmons and Co.
At the same time, Fickell could have stopped the clock, let his defense work to make plays and then see if there was some late magic for the Badgers. Instead, Wisconsin supporters are convinced Fickell just threw in the towel on the game. His reasoning for not using the timeouts he had available isn't helping anything either. Nope, it's making things worse.
Luke Fickell has Wisconsin fans calling for him to get fired after the loss to Michigan
"Yeah, if we had got the stop, it was gonna be the timeouts," Fickell said right after the loss via On3's Maize and Blue Review. "I thought that where we were and how many points we needed, we needed to have opportunities on offense. The one was right before the two-minute warning just to say, hey, but the truth of the matter is, I said, guys, we need to get a stop.We get them to third down in a situation where maybe they have to throw the football to keep the ball, then we’re gonna call the timeouts. And then we’re gonna give our offense shots with timeouts as opposed to putting ourselves in a situation where you call them and then they can’t stop them. It was more put on our eyes to show, stop them, we’ll call the timeouts, we’ll give our offense the ball back, we’ll have the timeouts with the situation so that we can play football. That was kind of the decision."
Dude, what? This was a bunch of word salad from the Badgers head coach. We understand that the offense couldn't do much of anything following the first scoring drive of the day. Still, you can't wave the white flag like this. You've got to fight until the final whistle.
That's what Michigan was quite literally doing, with the Wolverines almost scoring a late touchdown to increase its lead. The scoring ended up being closed at 24-10, but Wisconsin is now 2-3 on the year and this felt like the kind of game where maybe, just maybe an upset could have gotten posted.
It wasn't meant to be, with Fickell surprising a lot of us too by sending Simmons out to start at quarterback over Danny O'Neil. Next up for Wisconsin is a home showdown vs. Iowa. Fickell is in desperate need of a win, otherwise his seat is going to somehow get even hotter than it is now.