In a matter of months, Luke Fickell has lost his two biggest supporters at Wisconsin. Jennifer Mnookin is leaving for Columbia University, and Chris McIntosh is off to the Big Ten offices. Now, Fickell has to be feeling the pressure more than ever, and there's no one to protect him if another year goes south.
Fans have been after Fickell since his first woeful season, but as each year has gone by, the outcry has grown more severe. Signs were being hung at UW-Madison that said "Fire Fickell," and students/fans were chanting it at the games. Yet, for the most part, the upper management stayed quiet about it. Until Chris McIntosh issued a statement of support for Fickell.
McIntosh then vowed to help bring more money to the football program. He called it a bigger investment and essentially declared that Fickell would do better with more money. Which feels like an admission of failure by the AD himself to say, "I didn't give him enough resources."
Luke Fickell will need to win more than six wins to impress the new athletic director
Related: 4 names Wisconsin needs to consider to replace Chris McIntosh as AD
That same AD is now gone, and Fickell has no one to hide behind. He will actually need to go out and win games, and the excuses will fall on deaf ears. The new athletic director will come in knowing the displeasure of Wisconsin fans when it comes to where the football program has been the last three seasons. This will put Fickell under a microscope and even have the AD creating short lists of replacement names if Fickell can't win.
Truly, Fickell probably didn't need to do a whole lot under McIntosh this season. If he had shown progress at all, McIntosh would have shouted from the rooftops about his success and the improvement on the gridiron. Now, Fickell has to be circling eight or nine wins because if it's a lackluster six-win season, the new AD may have seen enough. Or at least fans can hope.
Fickell has no one left in his corner and now has to prove it on his own.
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