One of America’s top takeaways from the 2025-26 college football year was that Luke Fickell must have some dirt on Wisconsin for the school to have not canned him after its offensively pitiful 4-8 conclusion. The decision to keep him around swiftly sealed him onto one of the sport’s hottest seats entering the upcoming season, which just about everyone expects to end with him being chased out of Madison with pitchforks.
With such a bleak future likely in store for the guy, we have nothing to lose by daydreaming of how he could prove us wrong, which is something that, surprisingly, Wisconsin’s 2026 schedule seems to be assisting him with to the best of its abilities.
This is first evident through the powers missing from the slate: Indiana, Ohio State, Oregon, Michigan, Illinois, Washington; all won nine games or more in 2025, yet all are absent. That means the toughest Big Ten foe on the agenda (at least until further notice) would have to be Iowa, but even with its overbearing playstyle and notorious Kinnick Stadium, consistency has long been a question mark under head coach Kirk Ferentz, so who’s to say his Hawkeyes will have it once the Badgers come to town?
The only other conference games that give off a heavy stench of inferiority from Wisconsin—with that key word meaning not you, Michigan State—include at Penn State, USC and Minnesota, but still, while none of these qualify as a “gimme,” none of them have appeared good enough for their victory to be deemed unavoidable. This fact grows even clearer when considering that PSU is having to follow up a collapse with a completely new (and worse) staff and roster, while the Trojans and Golden Gophers have to do their dirty work in the famously rowdy Camp Randall.
As for the non-conference bunch, it starts rough with what is officially a “neutral-site” matchup against Notre Dame, but if the Badgers were ever going to down the Irish, it’d be in Green Bay for Week 1. From there, all they have is a pair of home affairs with Western Illinois and Eastern Michigan—they’ll live.
Especially when going under the assumption that Luke Fickell knows he’s fighting for his job this year, I’d have to keep the door open for an upset or two to be snatched from some of the big names we have here, similar to the ones his boys pulled off in 2025.
Taking that in with a handful of dubs they should be able to piece together from the manageable meetings I didn't address (at UCLA, Rutgers, at Maryland, at Purdue), I could see Wisconsin nabbing as many as eight wins this fall. That leap on its own may not do much to ultimately spare Fickell his job, but would it spare him some time with it? Most definitely.
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