Luke Fickell hasn’t exactly lit it up at Wisconsin since he took over the head coaching job for the Badgers — coming into Saturday’s game against Maryland, he had a career 15-14 record as head coach.
And with Wisconsin getting blown out by the Terps, the calls for Fickell to be fired through, say, a buyoutgot much louder. He was already on our list of hot seat coaches heading into this season, and given the start to the year, it makes sense that Wisconsin fans are fed up.
After an inconsistent start to the season for USC’s secondary, the defensive coordinator stood in front of a cadre of cameras and didn’t mince words. There were too many coverage busts leading to too many big pass plays, he said. He planned to spend the bye week studying film with microscopic focus in hopes of understanding exactly what had gone wrong.
“The lowlights cannot be that low,” he said. “You can’t just say it happens sometimes. Those things can’t happen.”
That coordinator was Alex Grinch, speaking in September 2023. Six weeks later, he was fired.
The circumstances aren’t quite that dire for the Trojans’ defense — or Grinch’s successor, D’Anton Lynn— in October 2025. But the problems with big pass plays have persisted since then. In fact, they’ve been worse this season than they were under USC’s previous coordinator, in spite of the fact that USC has yet to play a top-40 passing offense.
Through five games, USC has given up 51 pass plays of 10 yards or more. That’s eighth worst in the nation, equating to an average of over 10 such plays per game. And against Illinois, that propensity for allowing explosive plays came back to bite USC in a brutal loss.
“The pass defense has to get better,” USC coach Lincoln Riley said after the game. “It just wasn’t good enough.”
Two days later, when asked about the state of his secondary, Riley took a more encouraging tone. The cornerbacks, he said, “had a few errors here and there.” Take the game’s two biggest pass plays out of the equation, he added, and “it’s going to be really tough for them to beat us.”
Whether his cornerbacks have that same confidence coming out of the loss could be another question. How they respond out of this week’s bye, with key matchups against Michigan and Notre Dame ahead, might ultimately determine the course of USC’s season.
“Confidence, you can’t fake that,” Riley said. “We’re doing enough good things that it should show up and there should be confidence from that, but if we keep making some of the mistakes that we’ve made, whether it’s a busted coverage, or like not leveraging the football — those are controllable on us. Other people aren’t even having to make plays that way.”
