Luke Fickell should be embarrassed, and his face should be red with frustration. Even if he has the Badgers on a better path this season, getting shut out by the Iowa Hawkeyes in a rivalry game is awful. It's inexcusable, and there really should be someone getting fired after this; Jeff Grimes is probably a great start. After a pitiful offensive performance that seems to carry over each and every week. You could also talk us into benching Colton Joseph. But that's a different article.
Fickell has zero answers for the Hawkeyes, and he never has. He's winless against Iowa as the Badgers' head coach, and the Hawkeyes have outscored Wisconsin 124-16 in that time. Not only does he not have answers going into the Iowa games, but he also has none coming out. His quote after the game was, "That's an old-fashioned ass-whooping ... not gonna sit here and say I have any answers for you"
Well, find them quickly because Iowa is a team Wisconsin needs to learn to beat, but it looked like they were the best team in the nation today, and the Badgers were a JV high school program. They didn't even look close to each other. And that's not good.
Luke Fickell needs to fire someone this week; this is inexcusable year after year
Related: Jeff Grimes has serious explaining to do after Wisconsin took a 3-hour nap at Iowa
Wisconsin went out last week and shut down Lincoln Riley's USC offense, did some historic things, and then allowed a Hank Brown-led team without their star running back, Kamari Moulton, to absolutely dismantle them.
It's the worst loss of the season. It's not even close. Losing to Notre Dame was expected. Losing to UCLA was riddled with officiating problems and some early, easy issues (also, UCLA looks really good), but getting throttled by the Hawkeyes is a real and honest problem for Fickell.
The fact that he has zero answers isn't good. He needs to find them quickly. Even though the rest of the schedule gets easier, this feels like a coach-defining loss. One that we'll all look back on at the end of the season and go, "Yeah, but he can't solve Iowa."
Maybe he looks his coordinators in the eyes and fires someone. Maybe he looks at his quarterback and benches him. There are a lot of things he can do, but he has to find out what's going on against Iowa and fix it. This can't be the new normal. There's a Heartland Trophy at stake, and it's as if Luke Fickell couldn't care less.
This Iowa team lost to Minnesota last Saturday, and we need to come to terms with that because if Wisconsin also has no answers for Minnesota in the final week of the season, Luke Fickell has to go, and that's the cold, hard reality. We can't have a coach that doesn't show up for rivalry games.
Add us as a preferred source on Google