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Luke Fickell: Wisconsin Badgers won't have season-long team captains, new ones picked each week

Lorin Cox|
Oct 26, 2024; Madison, Wisconsin, USA; Wisconsin Badgers head coach Luke Fickell prior to the game against the Penn State Nittany Lions at Camp Randall Stadium.
Oct 26, 2024; Madison, Wisconsin, USA; Wisconsin Badgers head coach Luke Fickell prior to the game against the Penn State Nittany Lions at Camp Randall Stadium. | Jeff Hanisch-Imagn Images

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Wisconsin Badgers

The Wisconsin Badgers won't have one set of team captains this season. Luke Fickell sees 14 of them across his roster.

He confirmed on Monday that the team will pick a new set of captains each week as he operates the team under a different leadership structure.

Fickell has talked this offseason about a larger leadership group on his roster, and those 14 players operate as team captains of sorts. The problem is, that many players can't go to midfield for the coin toss every game.

"This is a group led [by] more than just specifically saying who's going to put a ‘C’ on their chest,” Fickell said Monday. “I think the strength is in the pack, and we have a leadership group of 14 guys that I really would say could be any of them."

He admitted to the team having some deficiencies in leadership over his first two seasons, so he's made that more of an emphasis entering a 2025 schedule that will be harder than any he's faced.

Fickell is hoping the structure they build on the front end will be strong enough to withstand whatever adversity comes their way this season.

"Just knowing what kind of battles we have and what kind of mountain we have to climb, we have to show the consistency within our own program," Fickell said. "Those that show that will obviously rise, maybe by the end of the year, and if it's 14 of them, then I wouldn't be hard pressed to say, ‘Hey, there's 14 guys that led this team.’"

The head coach hasn't revealed specifically who is and isn't part of the leadership group, though it's not hard to guess who some of the premier faces and voice in the locker room are.

How he chooses captains each week will be an extra dynamic to follow this season, giving us more of a glimpse into who has emerged as leaders of the team.

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Lorin Cox
LORIN COX

Lorin Cox is the managing editor of Wisconsin Badgers on SI. He has been covering Badgers sports since 2014, when he was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin. He previously wrote for the Wisconsin State Journal, NBC Sports Chicago and USA Today Sports Media Group, and he is a former analyst for Pro Football Focus.

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