Luke Fickell defenders use a common excuse, and maybe even Chris McIntosh also buys this excuse hook, line, and sinker. The blame is thrown in one direction that Fickell has only been bad in his Wisconsin tenure because he has never had his starting quarterback for an entire year. That excuse is nonsense, and don't let anyone convince you otherwise.
It's an easy excuse to use because when you look at just one small stat, you can see that he's 9-2 with his primary starting quarterback. Here are three reasons it's a garbage scapegoat.
1. Those wins are inflated by non-conference games
We don't know how these starters would have played out, since most of them didn't make it past a few games into the season. Tanner Mordecai went the longest in 2023, and he played eight total games, missing only the middle games of the season. His wins are against Buffalo, Georgia Southern, Purdue, Rutgers, Nebraska, and Minnesota.
While Nebraska may be a bit more formidable now, it's not an impressive list at the time. He also lost to Washington State and Northwestern.
The next season, in 2024, it was Tyler Van Dyke, and he played only two total games. He went 2-0 against Western Michigan and South Dakota. Some may give Billy Edwards the win for Miami (OH) to really stack the deck for this excuse and let it be 10-2. However, if you give Edwards that win, you need to give him the Maryland loss since he played about the same amount of time in each.
So the first reason this excuse is nonsense is because there are only four Power-4 wins in there, and those are against the bottom of the Big Ten in a year that Fickell inherited much of the roster.
2. Luke Fickell supposedly built this team to sustain it
All offseason, we heard that Luke Fickell built this team to sustain a loss of a quarterback since it had become a thing. He said that's why he recruited multiple transfer starting quarterbacks. It's why he wanted to bring in Jeff Grimes and create a more balanced attack. This year is now worse, without argument, despite who's playing quarterback.
So, we can't let Fickell use this excuse because he told us that he build this 2025 roster to sustain it.
3. There are plenty of NCAA examples of how it doesn't kill a successful year
Luke Fickell is not the first head coach to lose a starting quarterback early in the season. It happens literally all the time. In 2021, it happened to Michigan when Cade McNamara went down, and then in came J.J. McCarthy. Even if you want to say that it turned out McCarthy should have been starting all along, this is the point. This is literally what good coaches and teams do: next man up. It doesn't derail seasons.
Maybe a better example is when Cam Rising was supposed to be the starter for the Utah Utes in 2023, but he didn't even make it to the opener. The Utes used three different starting quarterbacks that season and went 8-4.
For Luke Fickell, every season gets worse, and the real problem is his ability to coach up quarterbacks or have anyone on his team do so and develop them into reliable starters. The "QB excuse" doesn't work, and don't let it work, tell people it's nonsense, show them this article.