What does a successful 2024 Badgers football season look like?

It’s that magical time between spring practice and fall camp when anything seems possible for college football teams, but I want to take a late May peek at what success would look like for the 2024 Wisconsin Badgers.

Anyone who is paying attention knows two things: (1) talent-wise, Wisconsin is in a significantly better spot than they were in 2023; and (2) schedule-wise, Wisconsin is in a significantly worse spot than they were in 2023.

This makes it very difficult to project how good the Badgers will be this fall. The ceiling and floor (as I’ve already recently explored) are vastly far apart from each other. But today’s piece has a different focus, as I want to look at what needs to happen to consider 2024 a success aka make us feel like the program is ascending.

To do so, I’ll look at three different categories: record, eye test, and recruiting. The first two have a lot of crossover, but the way the Badgers win or lose, including who they beat and fall to, is also independently important.

Record

This one is tricky because Wisconsin fans would typically look at anything under nine wins as subpar.

However, the difficulty of the 2024 schedule is so high that this attitude will need adjustment, especially against the backdrop of being in year two of a soft program rebuild. So I’ll set this at eight wins heading into a bowl.

To win this many games would mean that the Badgers would bag two no-brainer non-conference games, then win SIX more in this gauntlet: Alabama, at USC, Purdue, at Rutgers, at Northwestern, Penn State, at Iowa, Oregon, at Nebraska, and Minnesota.

Purdue at home is the closest thing to a gimme in the toughest Badgers’ schedule that I can recall. See what I’m getting at here? 8 wins, as a standalone, would be an outstanding effort with a schedule that 2023 Wisconsin might have won 4-5 games with.

Eye Test

While record is the most important measuring stick, how Wisconsin looks while winning/losing is also a big deal.

There are scenarios where the Badgers win six games and look really good/much improved, such as losing tight slugfests to Bama and Oregon, and scenarios where the Air Raid doesn’t really click but they still gut out some close games on heart and toughness and win seven or eight while getting rolled by elite teams.

This one is very hard to quantify, but over the course of the season, we’ll either see significant data points that show this is an ascending, potentially elite program or we won’t. Record/Eye Test should be highly correlated here, but that’s no certainty. (More on this with Recruiting, below.)

Generically, a passed eye test would include a generally consistent level of play on both offense and defense (including proof that the Air Raid works in Madison), and a number of competitive games against great teams (pulling out at least one or two), while consistently handling teams we should beat

Recruiting

This presents a tricky but important Z axis in evaluating a season. Like record and eye test, recruiting is generally well-correlated with success. The best teams tend to recruit better than teams below them. And winning makes coaches’ jobs easier on the trail.

NIL/Transfer portal makes this even more tricky, but I’ll roll it all into the broader category of recruiting. By all accounts, Fickell’s first class in 2024 was a very strong one, reversing a troubling trend for the Badgers. And why it was good went beyond rankings.

There was clearly a plan to get bigger and faster at key positions such as linebacker, defensive back, and running back, and the quarterback has massive upside.

But it’s very important to build upon this with a strong 2025 class. It’s far too early to draw any conclusions, but it’s fair to say that, while the Badgers have landed some dudes and the plan appears sound heading into summer, there is significant work to be done to match or exceed the 2024 class.

The good news is that there’s plenty of time for the staff to do just that, and how easy or hard this is will be strongly related to how the 2024 season goes.

While the fruits of the 2025 class won’t impact the 2024 season, whether or not we call the 2024 season a success or not will be tied at some level to the 2025 class. This is just the way it goes in program building.

Verdict

As you can see, there’s not one linear path that Wisconsin must take this fall to have the season considered a success. Rather, it’s a complex tapestry of inputs and potential outcomes.

To pick one out of the bucket, an 8-4 season with an upset or two, solid and improved play on both offense and defense, and a Top 25-type recruiting class would be the kind of season that would show that the Fickell plan is working.

But as noted, there are also scenarios where the Badgers win only six games but show enough progress where we can still tell the needle is pointed up, or a nine-win slate where recruiting falls off a bit. Everything is interwoven, and it should be an exciting, interesting ride.