Dispatch from the Badger State (and a Modest Proposal for College Football)

If it hasn’t gone extinct, the phrase “so college” is often used (sometimes ironically) to describe experiences or scenes unique to college life. Throwing a frisbee on the quad? So college. Not knowing if the bearded man walking by is a vagrant or your math professor? So college. Being starstruck behind the star QB in line at the pizza shop? So college. That college QB making 7 million dollars? Wait… The football coach making 10 million a year, and the university paying a $54 million dollar buyout to fire him? Hold on…

To state the obvious, college football is no longer “so college.” In the past, many admired the individual and collective virtues (perseverance, commitment, integrity, sportsmanship), community spirit, traditions, and rivalries that college football fosters. These are becoming less relevant in the face of conference realignment, billion-dollar TV deals, and loosened restrictions on transferring. College football– or college-sponsored football, as I refer to it – is now more akin to a professional sports league that is affiliated with colleges or universities in name only. My own alma mater, the University of Wisconsin, provides an interesting case study of the maladies assailing college-sponsored football, and college sports more generally.

The Badgers enjoyed several decades of success starting in the 1990s, after being terrible for the majority of the 60s, 70s, and 80s (including going winless for 23 straight games from 1967-69). Expectations changed under head coach Barry Alvarez, who began in 1990 and led the Badgers to their first Rose Bowl victory in 1993, and then to back-to-back Rose Bowl victories in 1998 and 1999. Alvarez built a successful program based on in-state recruiting, targeting the top high school players from Wisconsin. After Alvarez became UW’s athletic director in 2006, the Badgers continued to succeed, enjoying another run of three straight Rose Bowl appearances in 2010-2012 (this time, all losses).

After a couple of coaching changes from 2012-2015, Wisconsin hired UW alum Paul Chryst as the new head coach in 2015. Chryst was a Madison native and played quarterback for the Badgers in the 1980s. He then held numerous coaching jobs around the country and in Canada, returning to Madison occasionally to serve on the assistant coaching staff for the Badgers. His hiring as head coach back in 2014 was celebrated as the return of a native son, and also as a symbol of integrity, as the departing head coach Gary Andersen was apparently frustrated by our high academic standards for recruits. (That attitude is not uncommon. In 2012, Ohio State’s Quarterback famously tweeted “why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS”.)

Watching Chryst coach during his tenure with the Badgers was like watching your dad coach. He was an unflappable and down-to-earth guy who wore a grey crewneck and khakis. My personal favorite memory was a few years ago (I struggled to find footage of the interview) when, after beating Minnesota in our year-end rivalry game (the trophy for which is Paul Bunyan’s axe, which replaced the ‘slab of bacon’ trophy that was stolen years ago), Chryst was asked what it meant to him to win the Axe. His reply – “it means that we beat Minnesota.” Chryst was humble, kind, even keeled, and refreshingly free of scandal (I will forgo another opportunity to take a cheap shot at conference rivals in Columbus and Ann Arbor). Unfortunately, when the team started to struggle (relatively) towards the end of his tenure, these virtues were recast as vices, and he was seen as stale, uninspiring, and lackadaisical.

After Chryst’s midseason firing, another Wisconsin native and UW alum Jim Leonhard took the reigns as interim head coach. Leonhard played high school football in a town of 105 before playing for the Badgers as a walk-on. He ended up breaking multiple school records, being named to the All Big-Ten team multiple times, and eventually playing in the NFL. After his NFL career he returned to the Badgers coaching staff and was a successful defensive coordinator for Wisconsin under Chryst. With the interim head coach title, he was a strong contender to become the next head coach.

The university athletic department, however, decided that it was time for the Badgers to plunge deeper into the brave new world of transfer portals, nationwide recruiting, and college football playoff hopes. After the conclusion of the 2022 season, UW passed on Leonhard in favor of Cincinnati Bearcat head coach Luke Fickell. Fickell had gained national recognition for coaching the Bearcats to multiple successful seasons and even made it to the four-team college-sponsored football playoff in 2021 – the first time a team from a “non-Power 5” conference had done so. While his judgment should have been questioned the moment that he claimed that a taco is a waste of a meal, the allure of widening our recruiting and transfer reach nationally and of having a flashy “air raid”-style offense trumped the Badgers’ traditional regional recruiting strategy. That strategy had centered around large dairy-state linemen and, for some reason, running backs from New Jersey, which combined to create a successful ground and pound approach for decades. As athletic director Chris McIntosh said of Fickell’s hiring, “It sends a strong signal that we are committed to our program being successful in the long term. As the world changes, we will change with it.”

So far, things have not gone as planned. After going 7-6 in Fickell’s first season in 2023, the Badgers have now had two consecutive losing seasons for the first time since 1991-92. They’ve missed out on Bowl games for the first time since 2002, and their attendance numbers are at their lowest point in decades. It is hard to know where to place the blame for our recent decline, as Fickell’s hiring was not the only variable that changed in the last few years. The last several years have seen several other massive disruptions in the college-sponsored football landscape nationwide. These changes include ongoing conference restructuring, the end of prohibitions on athletes making money from their “name, image, and likeness (NIL),” the near elimination of restrictions and regulations when it comes to athletes transferring schools, and massive broadcast deals between conferences and TV networks. These changes have resulted in something of a free-for-all as far as spending, recruiting, and team-building, and have even altered the fan’s experience and game flow.

While these changes all have a common motivation – money – they come at the expense of the things that make college football worth watching: education in virtue, connection to place, shared traditions, longstanding rivalries, and the chance to watch college students who also happen to be excellent athletes compete. The product referred to as “college football” now being marketed for mass consumption is less about college students playing a sport and more akin to a semi-professional league that spends billions of dollars on facilities, coach’s salaries, coach’s buyouts, and NIL money, without clear academic contributions to the universities’ missions.

In July 2025, the White House distributed an executive order titled “Saving College Sports.” Mostly focused on reigning in university use of NIL deals as de facto “pay to play” arrangements, I believe that the proposed reforms are not radical enough. College-sponsored football programs have abandoned commitments to place, limits, and learning. To recover those commitments and reinvigorate college football (and collegiate athletics more generally), these programs need to be stripped back down to their roots. I offer six recommendations.

1. The semi-professional league designed for marketing and consumption on the internet and TV should be renamed “college-sponsored football,” as the name “college football” is misleading and inaccurate.

2. Recruiting standards and guidelines should be reformed to include the following guidelines: at least three quarters of a college’s team must be recruited from within a 500 mile radius, and all members of the team must be accepted to that specific college or university based on their academic qualifications.

3. Conferences should be realigned geographically, while keeping in mind the preservation of traditional rivalries (Why are Rutgers and UCLA in the Big Ten, exactly?)

4. The college football playoff should be eliminated. Winning your conference should be the highest possible achievement. As we saw with Notre Dame’s refusal to play in any bowl game after missing the CFP bracket this year, the CFP is making other bowl games less relevant and eroding sportsmanship (“if I can’t win it all, I don’t want to play”). If private groups want to invite conference champions, or any teams, for that matter, to play in exhibition “bowl games” after the season concludes, that is acceptable.

5. Colleges and Universities should divert some of their current athletics budget to promote amateur and intramural sports. President John F. Kennedy, who played football at Harvard, encouraged broad participation in sports, saying “We do not want our children to become a generation of spectators. Rather we want each of them to be a participant in the vigorous life.” The University of Chicago, which was a founding Big Ten member in 1896, did away with their football program in the 1930s, as University President Hutchins viewed it as incompatible with the school’s academic mission. When the school brought back football as a Division III sport in 1969, the first home game brought an eclectic crowd together: “Never before has such a heterogeneous conglomeration of Hyde Park weirdos ever supported the same event,” the school’s paper reported. This kind of local, particular, and convivial event combines the best features of sports with the best parts of college.

6. Regarding paying student athletes and the problem of NIL money, my above recommendations would hopefully encourage universities and teams to divert their attention away from big money TV deals and toward the community of players, students, and fans who will be a source of long term and deeper success. By returning to its regional, communitarian, and virtue-based identity, the “name, image, and likeness” of players will be recognized personally by their teammates, classmates, and neighbors. If a local shoe store wants to give the players free shoes or pay them for an advertisement, that is acceptable but an approval process would be in place through the university and possibly the conference.

I write these reflections as a citizen of the great state of Wisconsin and a fan of sports and athletics, and not as someone who knows or understands the financial and regulatory details of college-sponsored football. While they are unlikely to be considered or implemented, these reforms would bring college-sponsored football back from the billion-dollar semi-professional made-for-tv wasteland and return it to its proper place. . In the end, mass-produced and consumerist entertainment is often boring, while local, amateur sports are endlessly interesting.

I do not seek to minimize or eliminate the recognition due to greatness and skill. The reason that the most skilled athletes are televised is because we want to watch them and be reminded of the drama, strength, agility, and beauty involved in sport. My main aim is to caution against the monetization of these traits, and encourage a more balanced approach, especially when it comes to college-sponsored football. We will see if the Badger football program can right the ship and navigate the brave new world of college-sponsored football. But even if it can, the deeper question will remain: what are sports actually for? The best justification for supporting any university athletic department is not that it brings in billions of dollars, but that sports enhance the greater community and the education and formation that takes place in college. We should continue to consider whether trading these goods for a broadcast entertainment product and a short-term financial boon is worth it.

Image Credit: Arnold Friberg, “Howell to Hutson – The Passing Game” (1968-69)