So what's it take to onboard Wisconsin football transfers?
Breaking down what it takes to make these new Badgers officially part of the roster.
What fans see when a transfer announces his commitment to the University of Wisconsin football program is just the tip of the iceberg to get him on the roster.
Wisconsin was one of several Power Four teams that heavily utilized the transfer portal after its 4-8 season in 2025. The Badgers signed 34 transfers in January, which is the largest total in the four offseasons that coach Luke Fickell has led the program. The public-facing dissemination of information typically went something like this: Players declared their decisions via social media, or reporters such as ESPN’s Pete Thamel or On3’s Hayes Fawcett broke the news, and teams subsequently unveiled players’ signings at some point thereafter.
But Monique Felix, Wisconsin’s director of football administration, laid out the multi-layered, behind-the scenes process to onboard the nearly three dozen players from different teams onto the roster. Her efforts led to a successful reloading of the program, and On3 currently ranks its transfer class No. 15 in the nation.
She learned not to count the hours per week in her role, especially during a busy January.
“But I think this kind of a job in a season where even if you're not in the office, or I have a workstation at home, it's kind of 24/7 being on call,” Felix said. “I got texts (at) 9, 10, even 11 o'clock at night about different transfers who are coming in the next morning as they were finalizing schedules.
“So I don't have an exact number, but I can tell you, I worked fewer hours than our recruiting staff. They really took the brunt of it and did a great job over the portal period.”
It all starts before the transfer actually commits
A requirement for coming on an official visit is receiving the player’s transcripts, according to Felix, which also involves Wisconsin director of on-campus recruiting Taylor Ewald. It can also be recruiting staff obtaining those, and Felix can pull their high school transcripts through the NCAA’s Eligibility Center.
“I work really closely with our academic staff to review transcripts,” Felix said. “They begin prereads for seeing what credits and how many credits will transfer, so that we have an idea when the recruit is on campus, of what major they would be in at UW-Madison. If we don’t necessarily have the same major they had at their previous school, and then looking at that, we’re also doing graduation planning and projection, because that’s often a big question that transfers who are later in their career ask.
“Once they are on campus, a lot of those things we get to talk about. Which is nice from my perspective, because my introduction to them is really setting them up well for OK, if and when you decide to become a Badger, this is exactly what our relationship and our next steps are going to look like.”
