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Luke Fickell compares Wisconsin Badgers transfer portal recruiting efforts to 'Wolf of Wall Street'

The Wisconsin Badgers have put in countless hours of work to produce one of the largest transfer portal classes of any team in the country.
Lorin Cox|
Wisconsin Badgers head coach Luke Fickell has been extremely busy in the transfer portal.
Wisconsin Badgers head coach Luke Fickell has been extremely busy in the transfer portal. | Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

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Wisconsin Badgers

The Wisconsin Badgers have put in countless hours of work to produce one of the largest transfer portal classes of any team in the country.

It has head coach Luke Fickell feeling like he and his staff are running around like stockbrokers.

In interviews with reporters last week, he jokingly compared their efforts to the 2013 Leonardo DiCaprio movie "Wolf of Wall Street."

"I say there are some similarities, outside of the drugs and women," Fickell said. "But it’s like, the bell rings, and it’s bam, bam, bam, activity."

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He admitted it's a "bad analogy." He's not committing crimes like Jordan Belfort in the movie.

But it's representative of the countless hours he and his staff have put in evaluating hundreds of players across the country and bringing them in for visits.

Scouting and recruiting hundreds of players

They've had to transition from being coaches to becoming scouts and then recruiters once the portal opened.

"The only problem for us is, in the stock market, the bell rings at, what, 4? And things shut down," Fickell said. "There is no bell (for us). At 10:00 or 10:30, you try to shut your phone off. That’s about the only time.”

Related: Wisconsin Badgers 5 biggest misses in the transfer portal through one week of visits

Wisconsin Badgers general manager Marcus Sedberry has been a key part of the program's transfer portal success this winter.
Wisconsin Badgers general manager Marcus Sedberry has been a key part of the program's transfer portal success this winter. | Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

That relentless effort helped Wisconsin land 25 transfers in the first eight days of the portal opening while seeing as many as 20 of their own players aim to transfer out.

The work is still ongoing, too, with a few days still remaining before the portal closes for the year.

The Badgers are digging deep into their player evaluations to find the last few missing pieces.

“For three or four weeks, with our interior guys or an edge, like, they may have watched 300 guys,” Fickell said. "You don’t have a big enough recruiting department to do that. So for our guys, D-tackles, to evaluate 250 of them and try to rank them and put them in categories, that’s what they’ve been doing.”

It's helped Wisconsin land a new starting quarterback, a new No. 1 running back, a new set of starting receivers and tight ends, a few new offensive line starters and completely rebuilt rotations along the defensive line and in the secondary.

The moves still need to pan out on the football field next fall, but Fickell's efforts this month have the Badgers' stock rising at the start of 2026.

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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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