Wisconsin walked out of its win over Penn State with the kind of result that can hide a few ugly truths. The Badgers got the victory, but Luke Fickell made it clear this week that two areas of the game left plenty to clean up: turnovers and the run game.
The turnover battle was a mess for Wisconsin. The Badgers gave it away three times, and all three turnovers were Colton Joseph interceptions.
According to Karl Winter's interview with Joseph, "Two of his interceptions on Saturday were bad reads, trying to do too much, while one was the right read but a bad throw." Two of those picks directly led to 14 Penn State points, which made the margin even harder to survive.
Penn State, meanwhile, only turned it over once. That left Wisconsin on the wrong end of a 3-1 turnover ratio, the kind of stat that usually buries a team, especially in the Big Ten. Fickell didn’t sugarcoat it.
“We don’t want to try to win that way." Luke Fickell said, "That is not the identity that we want to try to overcome.
I mean, we were minus two in the turnover margin, and we won the game. We don’t want to try to win that way.”
The other issue was just as plain. Wisconsin barely won the rushing battle, finishing with 120 yards to Penn State’s 119. Fickell pointed that out too, and he wasn’t interested in treating it like a positive.
“You know, we only won the rushing battle by one yard. It was 120 to 119."
Luke Fickell explained about his Wisconsin offense, "So, you know, we don’t want to try to win that way. We want to be able to control the line of scrimmage.
We want to be able to take care of the football. We want to be able to create turnovers.
We don’t want to have to overcome those things.”
That lack of a real ground game has been a problem for Wisconsin, which is currently second-to-last in the Big Ten in rushing yards per game. That’s not the identity the program was built around, and it’s not the one Fickell is trying to install.
If you strip out quarterback rushes, the numbers look even rougher for the Badgers. Penn State finished with 96 non-quarterback rushing yards, while Wisconsin managed 81. That’s the kind of imbalance that can’t keep happening if the Badgers want cleaner wins.
The Penn State game was dramatic, but Wisconsin got away with living on the edge in two key areas. Fickell made it obvious that if the Badgers want that success to hold up, both the turnover margin and the rushing battle need to look a lot different going forward.
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