Luke Fickell explains plan on retaining current recruits, recruiting process

Luke Fickell couldn’t have been clearer in his introductory press conference as Wisconsin head coach about what the program will be built upon: player development and recruiting. While the former varies because of choices and designs of several coaches, recruiting is dictated by bigger forces that are harder to sway: Institutional history, geographic location and population demographics.

Fickell, who built a playoff-caliber Group of 5 team at Cincinnati, knows that Wisconsin has its own set of recruiting rules, ones he thinks can be the foundation of a great program. It all starts by prioritizing the Great Lakes and upper Midwest.

“Within a 300-mile radius, you can build the core and the crux of your program,” Fickell said of the Wisconsin football program. “And that’s what I love about this opportunity, is within a 300 mile radius, that will be the core of what it is that we do. I have a good grasp on that, obviously I’ve got to learn a lot more about maybe the 50 mile, the 60 mile, the 100 mile radius. But I know as you get into Chicago and the areas that these guys have done an unbelievable job in, there’s a lot of roots that have been built there.”

Places roughly within in Fickell’s 300-mile radius circle: cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Detroit and Minneapolis; and most of Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Iowa.

It is not Texas, California or the southeast, where similar amounts of talent can often be found with 50 or 100 miles of campus, but it’s a stable foundation for a program that can win double-digit games and compete for Big Ten titles.

Since legendary Wisconsin head coach Barry Alvarez retired at the end of the 2005 season, the Badgers have tallied nine 10-win or better seasons in 17 years. During that time, the Badgers employed three different full-time head coaches produced a bevy of NFL draft picks: JJ Watt, TJ Watt, Melvin Gordon, Jonathan Taylor, Joe Thomas, Travis Frederick, Rob Havenstein and Ryan Ramczyk, among others. (And yes, Russell Wilson, though he spent just a year in Madison.)

Suffice to say, a top-level program can be built at Wisconsin. Maybe not to the likes of Alabama, Georgia or Ohio State, but enough to belong on the same field. And the first step for Fickell in the whole process is making sure the current pledges in the Badgers 2023 recruiting class — currently ranked No. 64 nationally per the On3 recruiting database — are locked in.

“It’s a short time, and those guys are the ones whose lives are in a little bit of disarray, as well,” Fickell said. “The great thing about the University of Wisconsin is those guys might’ve been attracted here because of maybe a relationship with a guy. But they’re going to be here because of what Wisconsin is. Because of the school, because of the athletic program, because of the history. And that’s what’s really fortunate about walking in here in a tough situation — in three weeks that you’ve got to sign a group of guys. We’re excited about getting on the road, going out to see those guys and build a relationship. We hope that we can sustain every single one of those guys and we’re going to continue to push forward.”