The Wisconsin football program enters 2024 needing a bounce-back campaign in a bad way.
The Badgers’ 7-6 2023 season fell far short of expectations, but especially so when one considers the losses were to teams including Northwestern, Indiana, Washington State and Iowa. Now, the team looks a bit different entering 2024 and a daunting schedule awaits.
Related: Way-too-early record predictions for every Big Ten football team in 2024 — Power ranking all 18 Big Ten football programs after the 2023 season
An 8-4 season at minimum is necessary for the Luke Fickell era to gain positive momentum entering 2025. The schedule should be considered in the evaluation, but it shouldn’t be the end-all when this is what the new era of the Big Ten will look like. It’s on Fickell and Wisconsin’s leadership to adapt to the changes and carve out a successful place in the pecking order.
One important variable entering any football season — but especially this one for the Badgers — is returning production. ESPN’s Bill Connelly ranks every FBS team in the metric throughout the offseason, including this week after the initial transfer portal cycle concluded. The new era of college football makes it challenging to draw direct a correlation between returning production percentage and wins on the field, but it’s easy to conclude that returning starters are a good thing for teams looking to contend.
Yes, there are necessary disclaimers that a program would rather return ‘good’ production (in other words, not Iowa’s offense). So each example is a case-by-case basis, depending on whether the eventual replacement is better than the production that was lost. But that’s extremely complicated and misses the entire point, which is: that higher returning production is generally a good thing for top programs.
Wisconsin, despite all of the transfer talent, is almost at the top of the Big Ten: