During a chaotic offseason, Wisconsin coach Luke Fickell has lost his athletic director to the Big Ten office and his chancellor to Columbia. However, he does not seem to have lost sight of how important 2026 will be both to him and to the Badgers. "We know that our backs are against the wall, that's the thing that doesn't change," Fickell told ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg in a piece published Thursday. That is just the latest in a long stream of comments this offseason that suggest, in the aggregate, that Fickell had better generate some results this year. With no spring game on the docket for Wisconsin, here’s a brief look at the state of play in the Badger State. In Chris McIntosh, Fickell lost an important champion It was McIntosh—an All-American offensive tackle for Wisconsin in 1999 that worked his way up the Badgers’ athletic department for more than a decade—who snapped up Fickell from Cincinnati ahead of the 2023 season, and his loss was felt deeply. "It's not easy to lose a friend.…