What to take away from Wisconsin football's busy offseason in the transfer portal
Diving deep into who the Badgers have brought in this offseason.
This University of Wisconsin football roster will look very, very different next season.
And after all the work coach Luke Fickell and his staff have already put in this offseason, now comes the part of mixing the new and returning faces into a team.
The Badgers are obviously not strangers in utilizing the transfer portal since Fickell’s arrival in November 2022, but they’ve dramatically reshaped the program in the last three weeks during a critical offseason. A Badgers handout distributed before Fickell’s news conference Wednesday showed 32 players who previously played college football elsewhere, while there’s still one reported commitment that has not been announced by the program. There’s 14 incoming freshmen as part of the 2026 class inked since the December early signing period, with 12 arriving earlier this month as midyear enrollees.
“I think it comes down to making sure that we understand the first and foremost, that football’s still the greatest team sport known to man,” Fickell said. “If you can’t find a way to come together as a team, then you’re going to struggle, no matter how much talent you have. And so that kind of was the start of Tuesday, of saying, ‘Hey, everybody had a choice. Everybody chose to be here, to be Wisconsin Badgers.’
“Every coach had a choice. Every player that’s in this room had a choice. (Linebacker) Aaron Witt, who’s here for a seventh season, had a choice. And now we got to embrace the things that are around us, whether that’s 50 new faces, whether that’s some new brothers that you’re going to become connected to. We got to go to work at not just training and building football, but find a way to build a football team. And … a lot of pieces of that is about how do you work together? And that healthy competition is going to be something that will continue to be stressed over the next six, seven months.”
Here are several takeaways from Wisconsin’s bountiful additions from the transfer portal.
Wisconsin brought in some players who were very highly-regarded coming out of high school
This will be one of the storylines to follow from spring through the fall. Wisconsin signed six players who were consensus four-star recruits coming out of high school, according to Badger Observer’s notes: wide receivers Malachi Coleman (formerly at Nebraska/Minnesota) and Zion Kearney (Oklahoma), offensive line Lucas Simmons (Florida State), outside linebacker Jayden Loftin (Tennessee) and cornerbacks Cai Bates (Florida State) and Bryce West (Ohio State).
Outside linebacker Justus Boone (Florida/Arkansas) nearly reached that consensus status. On3, 247 and ESPN all had him as a four-star recruit in the 2021 class, but Rivals evaluated him as a high three-star player.
