Ohio State Taught Wisconsin Coach Luke Fickell About 'True Leadership'

The 2011 season did not go as Luke Fickell had planned, but there's lessons he learned that year and from former Ohio State Buckeyes head coaches that he's carrying into his Wisconsin tenure.

The Wisconsin Badgers have a new man in town that Ohio State Buckeyes fans have come to know over the years.

Luke Fickell not only played for Ohio State under former head coach John Cooper, but he was a coordinator for Jim Tressel and Urban Meyer's teams as well as bridging the gap between the two as the interim head coach in 2011 — a time he said he learned how to lead.

"The eight or nine months where I had an opportunity to kind of do things on my own really kind of showed me how important the true leadership behind all that we do is," Fickell said at Big Ten Media Days Thursday. "The failures I had, especially in those eight or nine months, probably as much as those other times with those guys have really helped me be who I am."

That's not to say throughout his playing and coaching career under Cooper, Tressel and Meyer that he hasn't taken a piece of each of their philosophies and incorporated it into his own coaching style.

"That's probably the greatest thing I learned, that there are many different ways to do this," Fickell said. "There are many different ways to lead. There are many different ways to win and to grow a program. But it's got to be you. It's got to be authentic and consistent in all those things.

"Taking things from each and every one of those guys that I was fortunate enough to spend a lot of time with, whether it was five years, six years, ten years and five years, that's a lot of experience."

Fickell was hired as Wisconsin's head coach in November 2022 after the firing of Paul Chryst.

The Columbus native previously served as Cincinnati's head coach since 2017 in which he revitalized the Bearcats' program.

After a 4-8 first season, Cincinnati went 53-10 across the previous five seasons under Fickell's direction. In that time, the Bearcats won back-to-back conference championships in 2020-21, claimed Military Bowl and Birmingham Bowl wins with a three-point Peach Bowl loss to Georgia and, most importantly, a College Football Playoff appearance — the first time a Group of Five school has done so in the playoff era.

As Fickell embarks on this new chapter in his career, he'll certainly have pieces he's taken from each prior head coach he's played or worked for, but he will always be set on trying to do things his own way.

"You could come and you could see and you could recognize things from all of them, but I think more than anything it's the ability to be consistent," Fickell said. "It's the ability to believe in what it is you're doing and be authentic in everything that you're doing."

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