The Collapse of Badger Football Is Not a Football Story

Junjie Guo and Ananth Seshadri

Executive Summary:

The collapse exposed an older problem
For thirty years, Wisconsin football won without the usual advantages. It recruited overlooked players, developed them better than almost anyone in its conference, and kept them. In 2021, NIL payments put a price on talent, and the portal let talent move. By 2025, Wisconsin had its first back-to-back losing seasons since 1991–92.

Football revealed the problem first because a roster turns over in four years and its results are visible every Saturday. The budgeting habit beneath it was not unique to athletics. Across much of Wisconsin higher education, the next dollar tended to go where the last dollar had gone. The state made adaptation harder by holding down the university’s price and denying it the borrowing authority its peers use. UW–Madison responded through new programs, philanthropy, and occasional reorganizations. Athletics controls its own operating allocation, yet followed the same historical pattern and was late to build the donor vehicle football needed in the new era.

Wisconsin’s decline is selective. The university remains strong in research and across much of the academic core, while losing more ground in professional programs, doctoral education, and football, where expensive talent and student demand move quickly. A university that simply lacks money declines everywhere. Wisconsin has not.

Nor is this simply a shortage of resources. State support per student has met or exceeded the peer median for twenty years, and the last fundraising campaign raised $4.2 billion. Wisconsin often cannot retain, finance, or redirect resources when a market changes.

• Where a structure captures and reinvests the return, Wisconsin has recovered. Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) supports research; additional undergraduate enrollment produces tuition the university retains; and Chapter 233 gave the hospital its own board, control of its operating revenues, and borrowing authority

• Where the return is diffuse, investment is easier to postpone. Doctoral programs, professional schools, and now football compete in national markets without the same ability to retain revenue, set price, finance growth, or build lasting donor capacity. Their declines are the slow-motion version of football’s collapse.

The cleanest internal evidence is athletics. Wisconsin funds its biggest earner least: in FY2024, football generated 58 percent of department revenue but received 24 percent of spending, the Big Ten’s lowest reported share. Athletics, not the state, sets it.

Football and the university draw on separate pools: tuition cannot pay players, and athletic revenue cannot repair the academic budget. The connection is institutional. In each, a price or allocation formed under an earlier market remained after the market changed.

Three locks on the market rate

• Retention. Schools and departments keep too little of what they generate, weakening the link between success and the next investment.

• Autonomy. The state holds resident tuition below the price charged by Wisconsin’s research peers and does not allow the university to borrow against its own revenue.

• Vehicles. Wisconsin has often lacked durable institutions that can receive, invest, and compound donor and commercial capital over time.

No one designed this system in a single decision. It accumulated over decades at a university successful enough that delay rarely looked urgent.

Who holds the keys

• The state should step back from political intervention in tuition, grant UW program-revenue borrowing authority, and give it greater project-management flexibility. That change would let UW finance projects against defined streams of its own future revenue, without pledging the state’s full faith and credit. Bucky’s Tuition Promise protects low-income families; aid should extend above its threshold so middle-income families do not bear the full increase.

• The university should let a meaningful share of revenue remain with the units that generate it and move marginal dollars as demand changes. Cross-subsidy remains essential to scholarship whose public value exceeds its tuition or grant revenue; the requirement is that those transfers be chosen, not inherited.

• Athletics and donors should direct more of athletics’ own resources toward football and build a durable structure for donor and commercial capital.

Wisconsin has talented students, distinguished faculty, generous donors, and substantial state support. It lacks the freedom and machinery to set price, finance capital, and move money as circumstances change.

In 1990, a chancellor looked at a football program with six wins in three seasons and an athletic department roughly two million dollars in debt, then moved money toward opportunity. Thirty years of winning followed. Then the problem was one program. Today it is the machinery around every program: price, borrowing, and where the next dollar goes.

Whatever the state proves willing to do for football, it has no principled reason not to do for the rest of the university.