PLATTEVILLE, April 15 — See if you can follow this trail, which is in management food chain order, not in chronological order:
April 7: The UW Board of Regents fires Universities of Wisconsin president Jay Rothman.
Jan. 25: UW–Madison chancellor Jennifer Mnookin announces she is leaving for Columbia University.
Sunday: UW–Madison athletic director Chris McIntosh announces he is leaving for a new position with the 18-team Big Ten Conference.
Sept. 6: UW football team heads into coach Luke Fickell’s fourth season, which follows two losing seasons, with yet another new quarterback and numerous transfers out and in.
So who is going to hire the next Badger athletic director who may have to decide when Fickell’s contract buyont is small enough (relatively speaking) to make Fickell leave?
If this seems familiar, you must be as old as I am. Back in 1986, while I was a UW–Madison student (and more importantly member of the UW Marching Band, whose latest Varsity Band Concert is Friday and Saturday at the Kohl Center), UW athletic director Elroy Hirsch (who was about to join chancellor Irving Shain in retirement) chose Tulsa coach Don Morton over acting UW coach Jim Hilles after the latter’s 3–9 season stepping in for the late Dave McClain. Hirsch then retired, replaced by Ade Sponberg, athletic director at a previous Morton employer, North Dakota State.
If you remember even some of that, you may remember what happened next if you can’t forget trauma. Morton followed a 3–8 season with a 1–10 season (with Platteville High School graduate Paul Chryst playing in his final Badger season) in which the only win came despite the Badgers’ veer-from-victory offense getting shut out. UW hired Donna Shalala as chancellor, and Shalala fired Sponberg and Morton after the latter’s 2–9 third season that included getting wiped out by Miami on national television and Michigan, both at home, among other highlights. One game in either 1988 or 1989 was summarized in the Wisconsin State Journal the next day by sports reporter Vic Feuerherd’s spelling UW as “BADgers” throughout the game story.
(I blame Shalala for not firing Sponberg and Morton during her job interview.)
My alma mater is not merely a football team, and it is not merely a collection of college sports teams either. But the football team doesn’t just fund most athletic programs at UW; it is a major economic engine by itself, and if you don’t believe that, ask the owners of Madison-area bars, restaurants and hotels what their football Saturdays are like.
Camp Randall Stadium’s stated capacity is 80,321. According to Big10Central.com UW’s announced average attendance last season was 70,403, but only an average of 49,063 tickets were actually used (scanned at the gates), which means 27 percent of tickets went unused and Camp Randall was only 61 percent full last season. (I can’t imagine buying tickets and not going, but apparently some fans do just that.) And fans who don’t go to games — even if they watch the games on TV — don’t buy food and drink or Badger merchandise in a stadium designed to empty as much money out of a fan’s wallet as possible.
Besides disrespecting the UW Band, which propped up attendance for decades, McIntosh deserves blame for the football mess because he started it by firing Chryst, who won 72 percent of his games at UW, which has fans who thought that was insufficient success. McIntosh also didn’t hire the popular choice, defensive coordinator and post-Chryst interim head coach Jim Leonhard, perhaps because the Badgers played no better after Chryst’s firing than beforehand. But the Badgers have slid backwards since Fickell arrived, and at some point you can’t blame the previous coach for leaving the cupboards bare in an era in which player rosters can be transformed within a season or two thanks to the transfer portal.
McIntosh does deserve credit for sticking with men’s basketball coach Greg Gard despite spoiled fans’ seeking his firing, and for evidently hiring the right men’s hockey coach, as surprisingly finishing second in the NCAA Frozen Four should indicate. And the Badgers won three national championships — two in women’s hockey and one in women’s volleyball — which is more likely a case of fortuitously not fixing what wasn’t broken in his case. It’s too bad as a great football alumnus (as in unanimous All-American selection) that UW fans will remember him for the past few football seasons, but future success will heal wounds. But that depends on whether whoever gets to hire the next AD hires the right person, whose responsibilities will begin with figuring out whether any football progress is being made this season and if not whether it’s time to write checks for Fickell to not coach. Bucky better get it right.
Your lunch break: If you need lunch plans Thursday, go to QueenB Radio at 51 Means Dr. in Platteville for brats and hot dogs as a medical benefit between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.
