The Badgers are about to make their most consequential AD hire in history, and it looks like they're going to do it ass-backwards.
Here, per Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin's own letter to the campus community this morning, is the plan:
"Both interim Chancellor-designate Eric Wilcots and I are grateful that Deputy Athletic Director/Chief Operating Officer Marcus Sedberry has agreed to serve as interim director of athletics effective immediately…
Given that my time as UW–Madison's chancellor is coming to a close, I have asked interim Chancellor-designate Wilcots to take the lead in determining what a search for a new director of athletics may look like and when it will occur."
Read that twice. An outgoing chancellor — who announced her departure in January and leaves for Columbia next month — has delegated the shape and timing of the next AD search to an interim chancellor-designate who has not yet started the job.
Above Wilcots, there is no UW System president. Jay Rothman was unanimously fired by the Board of Regents six days before McIntosh's departure. There is no interim system president. There is an "acting executive-in-charge."
That is the accountability chain currently positioned to pick the next person who will run Wisconsin Athletics for the next decade. A departing chancellor. An interim-designate. An empty system-president chair.
The next AD will inherit a football program with a head coach on the hot seat, a basketball program that hasn't reached a Sweet 16 in six years, the first full year of the House settlement and its $20.5 million revenue-sharing cap, an NIL economy that now functions as a de facto payroll system, and a Big Ten media-rights curve that eventually pays around $100 million per school but doesn't yet. In a world where AI is repricing what a traditional college degree is worth, athletics is becoming a larger share of what keeps a flagship university culturally and financially vital. It's very difficult to overstate the importance of getting this hire right.
……And none of the people currently running the search will be here to see how it turns out.
As a lifelong Chicago Bears fan, I've watched this movie before. My hometown team has, for as long as I've been alive, found a way to do things in exactly the wrong order — hiring head coaches before the general managers they'll report to, drafting quarterbacks before the coaches who will develop them, announcing presidents after the leadership group they were supposed to oversee was already in place. It has become a running joke in Chicago sports media that everything at Halas Hall happens backwards. The results are the results.
Respectfully, then, to the Board of Regents, to Chancellor Mnookin, and to Chancellor-designate Wilcots,
I am begging you — do not let Madison become Halas Hall. Pause the search. Empower Marcus Sedberry as interim AD with a clear mandate and a fixed horizon. Let Wisconsin's next permanent chancellor — whoever they are, whenever they arrive — own the hire that will define the next generation of Badger athletics.
Get the boss right first. Then let the boss pick the AD.