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Pate Argues Luke Fickell Is Safer Than the Hot Seat Lists Suggest

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Pate Argues Luke Fickell Is Safer Than the Hot Seat Lists Suggest

Wisconsin's coach keeps showing up on preseason hot seat rundowns, but Pate said the schedule does him a favor few people are talking about.

The Pate State Staff · Published AUG 9, 2026

ANALYSISProduced with Pate State AI · reviewed by The Pate State editorial teamStandards

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The Pate State StaffAUG 9, 2026

Pate argued that Luke Fickell is going to survive the 2025 season, and the reasoning has almost nothing to do with talent evaluation and almost everything to do with a Wisconsin schedule that quietly lets him off the hook.

The premise needing context: Pete Nakos at On3 published a hot seat roundup that lumped Fickell in with names like Mike Norvell, Dave Aranda and Mike Locksley — coaches facing real programmatic pressure. Pate said he saw the piece and wanted to push back specifically on where Fickell landed on that list, not the others.

The case for Fickell

Pate's defense of Fickell starts with circumstance, not scheme.

He called Fickell's run at Wisconsin defined by "the worst quarterback injury luck of any major head coach over the last few years," and paired that with an admission that Fickell's early staffing decisions didn't help. But Pate treated that as closed business — "that's ancient history, can't do anything about that now" — and pivoted to the idea that a coach can wander too far down a bad road and simply run out of gas before he can turn it around. That's the frame Pate used for the whole segment: not is Fickell good, but did he get too far down the wrong road to recover in time.

“Luke Fickell's not a bad football coach. He got down the wrong road too far.”— Josh Pate

Then came the part that actually built the argument: the schedule.

Pate walked through it live — Wisconsin opens against Notre Dame at Lambeau Field, a game he expects them to lose, followed by Western Illinois and Eastern Michigan, two games that should function as bye weeks in disguise. The next real test doesn't arrive until Penn State in week four. After that, Pate ran down what Wisconsin avoids entirely this year: no Ohio State, no Michigan, no Indiana, no Oregon. For a program that was the preseason runaway favorite for toughest Big Ten schedule a year ago, per Rhett Lashlee's strength-of-schedule rankings, that's a significant swing in the other direction. Fewer marquee losses means less rope needed to survive the year, and Pate's read is that the floor under Fickell is higher than the hot seat framing implies.

The forward-looking wrinkle to Pate's argument: he said that if Fickell does get fired anyway, he'd be a coach in demand, not a coach nobody wants.

Pate specifically floated North Carolina and a hypothetical Penn State opening as programs he'd expect to chase Fickell hard, on the logic that a bad circumstantial stretch doesn't erase what he showed he could do before it. That's a notably different treatment than most hot seat conversations get — usually the list is the point. Here, being on the list was the thing Pate wanted to argue with.

Where the argument gets shaky

The honest complication showed up in the room in real time. Jesse's staff had reportedly penciled in the Penn State game as a win, and Pate flagged that immediately: "there's nothing given about that day. You need to be careful." A soft schedule only saves a coach's job if the team actually wins the games it's supposed to win, and Pate himself expects a loss to open the season against Notre Dame. If Wisconsin stumbles against Western Illinois or Eastern Michigan — unlikely, but not impossible in a sport that produces upsets every September — or gets run off the field at Penn State, the same light schedule that Pate says protects Fickell starts to look like a series of exposed weaknesses instead. Pate acknowledged the skepticism head-on: "a lot of people disagree with me on that." He didn't pretend the room was unanimous.

There's also a version of this where the schedule argument cuts the other way entirely. A team that's supposed to beat everyone but Notre Dame and Penn State doesn't get credit for going 8-4 against that slate — it gets criticized for not going 10-2. Hot seat logic isn't only about losses to good teams; it's about failing to meet a lowered bar, and Wisconsin's bar just got lowered considerably.

Still, Pate's broader point wasn't really about wins and losses. It was about proportion — treating a coach who inherited bad injury luck and made early staffing mistakes he's since tried to fix differently than a coach whose program has structurally decayed. Whether Wisconsin fans in Madison feel that same patience by November is a separate question. Pate's just betting the schedule buys Fickell the time to find out.

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Up Next — Keep ScrollingPate Says USC-Notre Dame Never Should Have Left — and Argues Rivalries Deserve Fort Knox-Level ProtectionThe return of USC vs. Notre Dame in 2030 has Pate celebrating and stewing at the same time, and he used the moment to warn about what he calls playoff brain rot creeping into how fans think about scheduling.

CONTINUED FROM THE NOTEBOOK

Pate Says USC-Notre Dame Never Should Have Left — and Argues Rivalries Deserve Fort Knox-Level Protection

The return of USC vs. Notre Dame in 2030 has Pate celebrating and stewing at the same time, and he used the moment to warn about what he calls playoff brain rot creeping into how fans think about scheduling.

ANALYSISProduced with Pate State AI · reviewed by The Pate State editorial teamStandards

📝 The Sit-Down

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The Pate State StaffAUG 9, 2026

Josh Pate argued that rivalry games should be untouchable, full stop, and that the USC-Notre Dame series getting shelved for several years before its 2030 return is exactly the kind of scheduling drift college football needs to stop tolerating.

The series will not be played this year or next, but it is confirmed to resume in 2030. A viewer asked Pate how he should feel about that news — celebrate the return, or resent the wait. Pate's answer was immediate:

The argument

Pate placed rivalry games above even the sport's biggest showcase. "It's like the Pope meme, man. I'm holding Notre Dame USC here above and beyond the college football playoff logo cuz I grew up like that," he said. He went further, saying rivalries are "the very bedrock and foundation of college football" and that they "should be more secure than Fort Knox."

His proposed fix has no gray area. If he were commissioner, the terms of membership would be non-negotiable: "you sign up to be part of Notre Dame, you're signing up to play USC every year."

“You sign up to be part of Notre Dame, you're signing up to play USC every year.”— Josh Pate

From there, Pate said, "Case closed." Any athletic director or coach unhappy with that obligation, in his framing, doesn't get to renegotiate the schedule — they get to go coach somewhere else.

The analysis underneath that stance is where Pate got specific. He tied the USC-Notre Dame scare to a broader trend he called playoff brain rot — the instinct to treat every scheduling decision as a playoff-optimization problem rather than a football tradition to be honored. He cited Texas and Sark's postseason math from a year ago as the clearest illustration: after finishing 9-3 and missing the playoff, the argument circulated that a soft week-one game instead of Ohio State would have kept Texas' record spotless and its playoff case intact. Pate didn't dismiss the logic. He called it "true and irrelevant, cuz that's not how a competitor should think." That's the film-room distinction worth sitting with — the math checks out, but it describes a program optimizing for a committee's spreadsheet instead of playing the schedule a proud program should want. Crediting the logic while rejecting the mindset is the whole argument in miniature.

The complication

Here's the honest tension in Pate's own case: he conceded the committee's incentive structure is part of what created this problem in the first place. He pointed to Indiana's out-of-conference approach — loading up on lighter competition while it protects its Big Ten record — as basically a bet that the committee won't punish a clean record regardless of who it came against. Pate said flatly, "you won't. Playoff committee won't," and noted the committee has said as much publicly. If he's right that the sport's own selection process rewards soft scheduling, then rivalry games aren't just vulnerable to bad-actor administrators — they're vulnerable to a system that currently has no mechanism to penalize the programs that duck them. Fort Knox security doesn't mean much if the guards at the vault are the ones writing the incentives to skip it.

Pate's own fix for that isn't emotional appeal, it's structural — he wants a rankings process built to let a battle-tested 9-3 team leapfrog a schedule-padded 11-1 team, so a program like Indiana can't treat cream-puff scheduling as, in his words, a way to say the committee "won't box us out of that playoff." Whether the committee ever adopts that kind of resume-weighting is a separate fight from whether USC-Notre Dame should be permanent, but the two arguments live in the same worldview: protect the things that make the sport what it is, and stop letting the chase for a playoff spot rewrite the rules around them.

The kicker

USC and Notre Dame will play again, eventually, and Pate is glad about that much. But by his own logic, the next threatened rivalry is already circling somewhere on some future athletic director's spreadsheet, and Fort Knox only works if somebody actually guards the door.

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