Luke Fickell addresses challenges of bowl prep amid opt outs

It is tough to manage a roster in today’s college football world where players opting outs and leaving for the transfer portal is happening more and more often. Wisconsin coach Luke Fickell was asked about that challenge as his team is preparing to play LSU in the ReliaQuest Bowl.

Fickell admitted that as things stand, he doesn’t know exactly who the Badgers will have available for the bowl game.

“I think the reality is that where bowl games are today, I think is usually a pretty good glimpse of what the future looks like. You’re not sure,” Luke Fickell said. “I mean every team’s a little bit different, right. And there will be some conversations that we have to have and try to find out in the next week, I would say, who we’re going to have.”

Fickell is hopeful that most of the Wisconsin team will play in the game, but it’s still too early to know at this point.

It’s also hard to prepare for a game without knowing which players on the other team may or may not be playing.

“I think the matchup, I think the opportunity to go to Tampa, gives us a greater excitement,” Fickell said. “And I think that I would hope and believe that the landscape of what we’ve done here and what Wisconsin has been, that we will have a majority of our team.”

Wisconsin enters the ReliaQuest Bowl with a 7-5 record and is coming off of back-to-back wins to close out the regular season. Meanwhile LSU is 9-3 and has one of the most explosive offenses in the country.

If Wisconsin does have most of its roster, it would be a much different bowl game for the Tigers than what they experienced to close out last season. Purdue lost several players leading up to last year’s bowl game after Jeff Brohm left for Louisville. That led to an extremely undermanned Boilermakers team losing 63-7 in last year’s Citrus Bowl.

Luke Fickell would like to see most, if not all, of his Badgers players play in the ReliaQuest Bowl and also play well.

“But again, it’s a new age, it’s a new time, but we’ve got to find out,” he said. “I think that like I’ve been talking with Hunter Wohler a little bit about… we’ll find out who’s with us to continue to move forward, and that’s who we’ll go with.”

LSU is currently a 10.5-point favorite for the matchup, which will be played on Jan. 1 at Noon.