When the Wisconsin Badgers and No.19 Alabama Crimson Tide scheduled a home-and-home series for 2024 and 2025, the year was 2019.
Barry Alvarez was Wisconsin’s Athletic Director, Paul Chryst was the football team’s head coach and the program was in the middle of a stretch in which they won at least ten games in four out of five seasons. Alabama, meanwhile, under legendary coach Nick Saban continued to utterly dominate, playing in the last four College Football Playoff National Championship games, winning two of them.
In scheduling a pair of match-ups with one of college football’s most iconic programs, and its best of the twenty-first century, Alvarez had perhaps hoped that the looming of Alabama would provide motivation sufficient to push the Badgers into the league of college football powerhouses.
Maybe by the time the matchups rolled around, the thinking may have been, Wisconsin would have found itself in the same conversation as their formidable foes. After all, the Badgers had knocked on the door of a College Football Playoff in 2016 and 2017, finishing the regular season undefeated in the former.
But with the second game of the series set to play out on Saturday at 11 a.m. in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Wisconsin has fallen dramatically short of the future success they may have envisioned.
Alvarez retired in 2021, and Chryst was fired by new athletic director Chris McIntosh in 2022 amid a failure to accelerate the program. Fresh new face Luke Fickell was ushered in to set the program ablaze into the future. Yet under Fickell’s watch, Wisconsin has failed to find an identity, and have sunk into the bowels of mediocrity not experienced in Madison in over 30 years. As Fickell’s Badgers ready themselves to face Alabama, they do so not as equals, but emphatically as pipsqueaking underdogs.
In the midst of Fickell's third season, the Badgers are a shaky 14-13. Wisconsin missed a bowl game last season for the first time since 2001 and has yet to bear a signature win. There is no way around it: Wisconsin is currently a program on decline, fighting desperately to claw its way back into relevancy.
Even so, as Wisconsin makes its first trip into SEC territory since 1972, they find themselves having more in common with the Crimson Tide than one might expect.
For the Tide too, a lot has changed since plans to link with the Badgers were made. Alabama is also now led by a new face, Kalen DeBoer. Gone is Saban, who retired from the program in 2024 largely in part to a frustration of coaching in the era of the transfer portal and Name Image and Likeness. And much like at Wisconsin, Alabama has struggled to capture an identity in the wake of change.
In Saban’s 17 years as Alabama’s head coach, he amassed an otherworldly 206-29 record, winning six national championships and eight SEC championships. Under Saban, an aura of dominance pulsated in Tuscaloosa and reverberated throughout the rest of the country.
But in DeBoer’s first 15 games at Alabama, he has compiled a down-to-earth 10-5 record. DeBoer’s four loss team last year represented Alabama’s losingest season since 2007.
More troublesome is DeBoer’s record in games in which Alabama has been favored by over 14 points, a lackluster 4-4. Saban’s record in such games? 131-2. For the better half of two decades, Alabama was unquestionably feared around the country. With DeBoer in charge, their dominance has been severely questioned.
Before taking over at their respective programs, Fickell and DeBoer both experienced major success at their previous schools. Over six seasons, Fickell coached Cincinnati to a 57-18 record, including an undefeated regular season in 2021 that resulted in his team becoming the first and only non-power conference team to appear in the four-team College Football Playoff. Before Alabama, DeBoer went 25-3 over two seasons at Washington, reaching the national championship game in 2023.
Fickell and DeBoer were both looked upon as worthy figures to guide respected programs into the next chapter of their history. They have both floundered at their new stops. And they now both face the heat of anxious fanbases unhappy with experiencing their programs flounder with the precipice of decline.
To be clear, Wisconsin and Alabama’s positions, while relative to each other, still widely differ. While Wisconsin faces a steep uphill climb back to the upper echelon of an 18-team Big Ten, Alabama still occupies a place near the top of the daunting SEC, despite having fallen a few notches in the past few years.
Alabama will still compete for College Football Playoffs, whereas Wisconsin would need a miracle to reach such heights. Barring catastrophe, Alabama will continue to bring in top-10 recruiting classes — such a thing has never occurred in Madison, and doesn’t seem to be on the horizon. The differences could be felt last season, when Alabama pummeled Wisconsin 42-10 at Camp Randall Stadium.
Still, in having both taken steps down from the positions they assumed just a few years ago, the two programs experience similar realities.
DeBoer’s latest embarrassment was Alabama’s season opening blunder, a 31-17 throttling at Florida State in a game in which the Crimson Tide entered as 13.5 point favorites. Losses last season to unranked Vanderbilt and Oklahoma were eye-opening because they seemed uncharacteristic. The Florida State loss felt different because it opened the door to a new reality for Alabama, one that features them not as college football stalwarts, but as a program sliding to the point where sloppy losses may be the norm.
It was the latest sign that DeBoer’s Alabama is a far cry from the Crimson Tide of old, a sign that Fickell and Wisconsin will gladly accept as they head South for what they hope will be the program-defining win that has proved so elusive.
With both teams facing the heat that comes with disappointment, one team will find the beginning of a path out of their respective recent mediocrity, and the other a trap that could sink them deeper into discontent.
Alabama is still Alabama. They are currently favored by 21.5 points. But their recent play suggests that Wisconsin has a chance. Whether or not the Badgers can seize on the Crimson Tide’s newfound vulnerability will be a testament to Fickell, and a marker of whether he is the man to pull Wisconsin out of their now seasons-long rut.
