Daily briefing: On the balanced Big 12, Wisconsin’s new attitude and Luke Fickell
Ivan Maisel’s “Daily Briefing” for On3:
In the Big 12, ‘anybody can beat anybody’
Kansas and Kansas State are 2-0 in the Big 12, and Oklahoma is 0-2. Make that No. 19 Kansas and No. 20 Kansas State, who join No. 7 Oklahoma State and No. 17 TCU as the four remaining unbeatens in league play. The Cowboys appear to be a step ahead of the field, especially after winning 36-25 at Baylor last week. But the rest of them look like a pack of steeplechase runners jostling for position. “Anybody can beat anybody, without a doubt,” said TCU coach Sonny Dykes, whose Horned Frogs play the Jayhawks on Saturday after ESPN stages College GameDay in Lawrence for the first time. “What other league can you say that about?” Put it this way: The last-place vs. first-place game in the other Power 5 conferences would be Clemson-Louisville, Ohio State-Michigan State, USC-Colorado and Alabama-Vanderbilt (55-3 Tide, last month). In the Big 12, it would be Kansas-Oklahoma. In that order.
A new financial attitude at Wisconsin
There may not be a direct connection between the Big Ten’s new TV deal, which will bring each member school an additional $25 million per year, and Wisconsin deciding to pay Paul Chryst $11 million not to coach. There are plenty of precedents for buying out coaches, and that’s just at Auburn. But Wisconsin? That program always seemed to make common-sense decisions and watch its bottom line. Remember a decade or so ago when former coach Bret Bielema got frustrated by limits on what he could pay his assistants? There’s a new attitude in Madison. The Badgers will pass the hat among their boosters, and Chryst will get money he never wanted. And universities will continue to do a terrible job of explaining to the public all the goods and services they provide their athletes. What the public sees is a school that’s about to get $25 million more per year deciding to pay nearly half that amount to a fired coach.
Luke Fickell: Stability is the key
Cincinnati coach Luke Fickell made it clear this week that he’s not a fan of bringing in players from other campuses. “That’s not who we are. That’s not how we grow the program,” Fickell said. “There needs to be some stability to give 18- to 22-year-olds a chance to grow.” And yet the Bearcats’ leading rusher a year ago, Jerome Ford, came from Alabama. This year, junior linebacker Ivan Pace Jr., who came to Cincinnati after being the 2021 MAC Defensive Player of the Year at Miami (Ohio), leads the FBS with 13.5 tackles for loss. Fickell sees the portal as a way to spackle holes in his depth chart. “As we continue to see how this college football era in the next 10 years goes,” Fickell said, “you’re going to see that the ones with more stability are going to be the ones that … you know year in and year out are going to be good.”