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MADISON, Wis. — Chris McIntosh sat in his office overlooking Camp Randall Stadium on an unseasonably warm April morning and flashed the easygoing smile of a man filled with optimism. Six months earlier, the field directly behind Wisconsin’s athletics director had been the site of a low moment — an uninspiring 34-10 loss to Illinois — that prompted McIntosh to make the most painstaking and significant decision of his tenure.

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McIntosh fired head coach Paul Chryst, who had gone 52-16 with three Big Ten West titles in his first five seasons but just 15-10 in two-plus seasons since, including 2-3 to open the 2022 campaign. It marked the first firing of the football coach at Wisconsin in 33 years and the only one done in the middle of a season.

That decision served as a seismic moment for Wisconsin and for McIntosh, given that the Badgers had been one of the more stable programs in the country for decades. Yet as McIntosh reflected this spring on where he believed Wisconsin football could go, he spoke with conviction about the need for change to allow the Badgers to reach their goals.

The way McIntosh saw it, there were two paths: 1) Be consumed by the fear of failure and therefore unwilling to disrupt the status quo, or 2) Embrace the opportunity and possibilities ahead for something greater. He chose option two.

In the end, McIntosh secured one of the best head coaching hires of the year, landing Luke Fickell from Cincinnati in late November. McIntosh chose the 49-year-old Fickell, who spent 15 years coaching in the Big Ten at Ohio State and went 57-18 at Cincinnati with a College Football Playoff appearance, over 40-year-old interim coach and beloved Wisconsinite Jim Leonhard.

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Fickell signed a seven-year contract set to pay him an average of $7.8 million annually (Chryst was making $5.25 million when he was fired). It was a move that signaled to Wisconsin supporters and the college football audience at large that the Badgers, who have yet to break through as a Playoff team, were stepping up to compete in the changing landscape of the sport.

“I can recall here as a player in my underclassman days, early years, trying to live up to something and almost a fear of not being able to,” said McIntosh, who started 50 consecutive games at left tackle for Wisconsin from 1996-99 and was part of two Rose Bowl-winning teams. “And then at some point, you become confident in what you’re doing. You embrace this expectation and then you lay it all on the line and you just go for it. I feel like that’s what we’re trying to do right now.

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“There are no guarantees in any of this, whether it’s on where you’re going to end up in the season or in a particular game. But that’s to some extent out of our control. What is in our control is what we do every day to put us in the best position possible to compete at a championship level. I think we are embracing that and we’re going for it and we’ll let the chips fall where they may.”

Fickell and his coaching staff are less than three months away from the Sept. 2 season opener against Buffalo. That means the honeymoon phase remains ongoing before results on the field take precedence. But what Fickell has instilled in a short time is a high level of accountability, intensity and energy that has created a level of unparalleled excitement. And with it comes a belief from those inside the program that Wisconsin can achieve more, perfectly aligning with McIntosh’s vision when he made the difficult decision to alter course in October.

“We’re not here just to win eight games,” Wisconsin receiver Skyler Bell said. “We’re trying to win a national championship. We want to win a Big Ten championship. I think with that being our mindset, it triggered a switch in everybody’s heads, which is we’ve got to go. No team is going to wait on us, and we can’t wait on anybody. It trickles down from coach Fick.”

On Fickell’s first day in charge at Wisconsin, he met with his new team and delivered a message meant to soothe the ache of the players upset about Leonhard’s status and outline the approach necessary to succeed. He told them: “Change is inevitable. Growth is what’s optional. We have to choose to grow.”

What did that entail? Players were about to find out.

Fickell spent his first month allowing the Badgers’ previous assistant coaches to handle the game-planning and coaching for Wisconsin’s Guaranteed Rate Bowl game against Oklahoma State out of respect for them and the team’s players. Wisconsin won 24-17, with Fickell serving essentially as a figurehead coach on the sideline that night. When players returned to campus in January for winter workouts, Fickell began putting his own imprint on the program.

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Fickell believed a strong culture already existed among players in the locker room. But there were tweaks he felt were important to make.

“Literally every detail of everything we do is calculated, and it has a purpose,” Badgers tight end Jack Eschenbach said.

No player is allowed to take the elevator inside the football facility if the destination is merely one or two flights of stairs away. Some players, like Bell, learned the hard way when his position coach caught him coming off the elevator on the first floor from the second floor and forced him to walk back up the stairs and then down again.

That directive may seem silly to some on the outside, but it is one of many designed to create a sense of accountability and mental toughness. Fickell stresses that how you do anything is how you do everything and that the little details add up to something bigger.

“Sometimes after a long practice, it’s a little tough,” Wisconsin receiver Chimere Dike said. “But you can’t take the easy way out.”

Players say they first noticed Fickell’s intensity during team meetings, when he turned what once were routine gatherings into rapid-fire question-and-answer sessions, calling on players at random to produce a response.

“He’ll ask a question and then he’ll just get in your face like, ‘What! What! What!’” Eschenbach said. “Because he wants you to operate under extreme pressure just like in a game. When you get into a game, people are screaming. There’s external factors all over the place. And the whole goal is that he tries to put us in these really uncomfortable situations all the time.”

Part of Fickell’s plan was to generate competitive situations and keep players on their toes as often as possible, whether that meant grueling offseason mat drill workouts reminiscent of his high school wrestling days or altering a practice plan to ask for three extra minutes of focus in a drill following a lengthy spring practice. Members of his strength staff would bring in a basketball hoop to the weight room for a dunk contest or a deck of cards for a round of blackjack, in addition to tug-of-rope and stationary bike contests to ensure there was always a winner or a loser and something at stake.

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During spring practice, Fickell instructed a member of the video team to focus a camera on one player for every drill or snap in a given practice as part of an “iso cam.” The idea was to show that player how hard he was practicing when he watched the video afterward. The catch: None of the players knew when their day would come, ensuring that all of them gave their best effort each practice.

“I love that he does that because it’s a different level of accountability,” Badgers receivers coach Mike Brown said. “To me, more than anything else, that iso cam kind of sets the culture of the program. It lets guys truly see what the expectation is.”

Fickell reminded players after one workout that the team, which finished 7-6 last season and with a losing Big Ten record for the first time since 2008, was 1-4 in games decided in the fourth quarter. That’s why it was so important to learn how to strain and fight through adversity.

Players, who were tired of three consecutive disappointing seasons, eagerly greeted his methods, in part because of how he also stressed building relationships with them. Little things have stood out, like when Fickell jumped in the cold tub in front of players in early March to chants of “We want Fick.” Players say Fickell stresses that he won’t ask them to do anything he wouldn’t do.

“The excitement around our program right now is off the charts,” McIntosh said. “It’s been incredible. I credit Luke and his staff and this team with everything they’ve done in creating a lot of buy-in from the inside-out. I think it’s pretty powerful right now.”

Fickell has preached effort, attitude and competitive spirit from the beginning. Bell said everything is fast-paced, from running to perform drills in the weight room to practices. That’s why Fickell said the team didn’t condition during the spring. Practice was the conditioning.

“How things were done in the past, I don’t know,” Fickell said. “But just the intensity, the speed, the tempo at which we want to go, whether it’s working out, whether it’s taking the field, whether it’s the way you practice, the way you go from drill to drill, I just think that they’re learning us. We’re going to coach them really hard, and we want them to be able to understand that and embrace that.

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“Sometimes that’s hard when you’re new. Not because it’s different but because maybe you don’t know the guys as much. They don’t know me as much. That trust factor is not as high. So we’ve got to be able to build that really quick. And I think we’ve done a great job.”

Wisconsin’s loss to Illinois — the program’s first home defeat to the Illini in 20 years — highlighted just how far the Badgers were from being a championship-caliber team. They finished with two yards rushing on 24 carries, including sacks, wilting after Chryst instructed them at halftime to draw a line in the sand on their season. And they couldn’t take advantage through the air when the Illinois defense sold out to stop the run, completing just 2 of 8 passes for 29 yards against eight-plus defenders in the box, according to TruMedia.

The offense had grown stale and lacked discipline and a consistent passing attack, and opponents made the Badgers pay. Only three FBS teams faced eight-man boxes against the run more last season, all service academy teams that ran the triple-option.

One of Fickell’s first orders of business when he took over was to modernize and open up the offense. He did so in a most un-Wisconsin-like way, hiring North Carolina offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Phil Longo for the same roles. Longo, a disciple of the Mike Leach Air Raid offense, brought his up-tempo, no-huddle system to Wisconsin, which had traditionally operated with a methodical pro-style approach.

No move Fickell made this offseason had a greater impact on personnel upgrades because it convinced players who otherwise would not have considered Wisconsin to give the Badgers a more serious look. Of the 13 scholarship players Wisconsin brought in from the transfer portal before spring practice, seven were quarterbacks and wide receivers. All three quarterbacks — Tanner Mordecai, Braedyn Locke and Nick Evers — were four-star high school prospects.

Mordecai, a record-setting quarterback at SMU the past two seasons, arrived as a sixth-year senior and as the most highly touted quarterback transfer at Wisconsin since Russell Wilson. Cincinnati transfer Will Pauling and USC transfer CJ Williams — a top-10 receiver in the 2022 recruiting class — broke into the starting rotation this spring. Williams was recruited by Wisconsin out of high school but didn’t strongly consider the Badgers because he wanted an offense that emphasized the passing game more. Now, he has that at Wisconsin.

Fickell said he didn’t set out to radically alter the offense. Instead, he chose Longo, whom he attempted to hire previously at Cincinnati, because of their relationship and the trust they had developed.

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“There is uniqueness and maybe it’s a little bit different,” Fickell said. “I think it’s an exciting time for that. But I don’t want to lose sight of what it’s really about. I think it’s first and foremost about the people.”

McIntosh, who played for Hall of Fame head coach Barry Alvarez when running back Ron Dayne racked up more career carries than any FBS player, said he is embracing the change. He also noted that Wisconsin isn’t abandoning its commitment to the run — Longo actually ran the ball more than he passed at UNC in 2020, when he had a pair of 1,000-yard running backs. With Braelon Allen and Chez Mellusi forming potentially one of the top tailback duos in the country, Wisconsin coaches intend on giving them the ball plenty. The idea is to lighten the box to allow more space for the Badgers’ athletes to operate.

“To me, that’s really exciting,” McIntosh said. “But at the same time, when I watch spring practice and I’m trying to wrap my head around or trying to understand what’s happening, there’s a learning curve. Right now our players are going through a learning curve and our fan base will do the same. But it’s a lot of fun to watch.”

For people who may be concerned that Wisconsin is straying too far from the core principles that allowed the Badgers to succeed since the Alvarez days, players offer assurances that isn’t the case.

“We’re still going to hit hard, and we’re going to be physical as hell,” Eschenbach said. “But it’s going to be in a new way.”

Fickell’s trust in people has led to other critical structural changes. He hired his defensive coordinator at Cincinnati, Mike Tressel, to take over for Leonhard and implement a 3-3-5 system that creates even more playmaking opportunities for linebackers and defensive backs. Fickell said at the start of his tenure that the two most immediate needs for Wisconsin before practices began were the recruiting department, an area that slipped late in Chryst’s tenure, and the strength and conditioning program. He brought valued members of his staff from Cincinnati with him, hiring Brady Collins as his strength coach and Pat Lambert and Max Stienecker to head up recruiting.

Collins has been widely praised by players for his energetic personality and move away from Olympic-style lifting toward a more machine-based approach that keeps them fresher and more athletic. Lambert and Stienecker are much more hands-on in the overall organization and recruitment of players. They have helped coaches embrace social media as part of a coordinated effort and contributed to the fan base’s frenzy by setting up Fickell’s Twitter “bat signal” to announce forthcoming commitments.

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Everything Fickell has implemented is the result of chasing a single objective that he outlined the day he was introduced as Wisconsin’s coach: Winning championships. He made the same declaration at Cincinnati and turned a 4-8 season in his first year into back-to-back American Athletic Conference titles while becoming the first Group of 5 school ever to reach the Playoff during the 2021 season.

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Wisconsin has been on the cusp of the upper echelon but generally on the outside looking in. Dating to the beginning of the BCS era in 1998, the Badgers would have made a 12-team playoff eight times. Yet Wisconsin has never reached the four-team Playoff or played for a national championship. The Badgers also haven’t won a Big Ten title since 2012. With the conference set to add UCLA and USC and eliminate divisions in 2024 and college football moving to a 12-team playoff the same year, Wisconsin appears to have made the adjustments necessary to be well positioned for its future.

It’s a new era, with new energy and new possibilities. Will it lead to the championships Fickell and McIntosh are seeking? That remains to be seen. But Wisconsin is going for it.

“I feel like everybody’s gotten a fresh start here with the whole transition of football coaches and strength coaches,” tight end Hayden Rucci said. “It’s really a time to turn the page and start a new chapter. But everybody has embraced it with open arms. With all the changes, it’s been awesome.”

Editor’s note: This is part of a series of stories examining the 2023 college football season’s most intriguing programs. Which teams are primed to break out? Struggling to find consistency? What’s gone right — or wrong — and what comes next? More recent stories in this series:

(Top illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: John Fisher, Chris Coduto / Getty Images)

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