3 questions as Wisconsin football restarts spring practices this week
Badger Observer's got some questions after the first one-third of practices.
Luke Fickell didn’t know if spring practices are “a whole lot different” with so many new faces on his University of Wisconsin football team.
Fickell had just wrapped up Wisconsin’s fifth spring practice of the 2026 offseason Tuesday inside the McClain Center. He’s in the midst of his fourth offseason as Badgers’ coach, a critical time where the program dove into the transfer portal and signed 34 new players after two consecutive losing seasons. The vast majority of Wisconsin’s 2026 class, 12 of the 14 freshmen to be exact, are already on campus as early enrollees.
There’s been plenty of turnover within the program with those who could heavily contribute this year, and that’s not even counting the numerous changes on staff.
“Every year is a new year, and every year you’re trying to figure out what the nature of the leadership and culture is going to continue to grow to be,” Fickell said. “I just think it’s a little bit more of an unknown in the sense that you got so many new guys, and in our case, so many new guys that I’d say have a great opportunity to play a big role. In the past, maybe we’ve had a quarterback and maybe we’ve had one or two other guys that you might think are going to play a significant role.
“Now, I think we’ve got a bunch of other guys who are going to play significant roles. So I think that’s where that idea of, hey, we got to practice. We got to try to stay as healthy as you possibly can in spring, because that’s what usually happens. You get limited with the number of guys, so it’s hard to get younger guys work. But then you never have a chance sometimes to figure out what you can really do by going live. And so we’re going to try to work this progression of maybe in no pads on Tuesday and shells, and then be able to go a little bit live on Saturday, because we do need to find out a lot about not just ourselves, but all the guys in the program.”
Wisconsin’s sixth practice commences Thursday morning, its second after the university’s spring break. Here are three big questions entering the final two-thirds of spring ball.
