Wisconsin’s Luke Fickell and Minnesota’s P.J. Fleck trade jabs over recruit

New Wisconsin football head coach Luke Fickell and Minnesota football head coach P.J. Fleck traded words over a recruit on early national signing day.

The dispute between the two head coaches came from the recruitment of a new Minnesota football signee, three-star defensive lineman Martin Owusu who had been committed to the Golden Gophers since May of 2022.

P.J. Fleck, during his news conference on early national signing day, said that Luke Fickell and Wisconsin tried to flip Owusu with “negative recruiting.” Fleck went on to say “it didn’t work. We axed it.”

Wisconsin head coach Luke Fickell responded to those claims later in the day when he had his news conference.

"I know nothing about it and I won’t negatively recruit.I’m not saying that somebody didn’t call. I know we may have reached out to somebody, but I wouldn’t think we would have said anything negative about a guy going anywhere.We have enough good things to say about the program here and what we want to do and where we’re headed to worry about saying anything negative about anyone else."

The two schools are only about four hours apart from each other. They’re rivals who have recently competed with one another for the Big Ten West divisional crown.

The two schools play every single year for the Battle for Paul Bunyan’s Axe at the end of each season. Minnesota has won the last two meetings between the schools.

Luke Fickell was hired away from Cincinnati and has already given the Badgers a boost in recruiting taking some of the players he had committed to the Bearcats and flipping them to Wisconsin such as Amare Snowden.

We don’t quite know if Wisconsin tried to negative recruit in order to flip the defensive lineman, but the battle between the two schools in the northern midwest is going to heat up on the recruiting trail as both Luke Fickell and P.J. Fleck are excellent recruiters.