MADISON — Wisconsin football has heard more than a few times about its challenging schedule ahead of the 2025 season.
“You want to be at the top of college football; you want to be at the top of the mountain. You got to go through the top competition,” quarterback Billy Edwards said at the Badgers’ local media day after he already talked about it at Big Ten media days. “We obviously have that on our schedule. … There’s a lot of good opportunities.”
Defensive lineman Parker Petersen said “you hear it all the time.” Offensive lineman Joe Brunner is well aware, too.
“We know that nobody outside of this facility that we are in believes in us,” Brunner said during fall camp. “They got all this talk about ‘you got the hardest schedule in college football.’ But that’s what you want. … It’s cliche, but if you want to be the best, you got to beat the best.”
The frequent talk about the Badgers’ 2025 schedule is no surprise considering how unusually daunting it is — both across the country and compared to past Badgers teams.
Six of UW’s opponents are ranked in the preseason US LBM Coaches Poll. The only schools with more ranked foes are Oklahoma, Mississippi State and Florida. (The three SEC schools each have seven ranked foes.)
The Badgers’ six ranked opponents include three teams in the top 10 — No. 2 Ohio State, No. 7 Oregon and No. 8 Alabama. The other three are ranked No. 19 or higher.
No other Big Ten school has six ranked opponents, and Purdue is the only school in the conference with five ranked teams on its slate. In fact, Wisconsin has as many ranked opponents, again based on the preseason coaches poll, as rivals Iowa and Minnesota have combined. (The Hawkeyes have four, and the Gophers have two.)
While the concept of a tough schedule is hardly novel in a power conference like the Big Ten, the extent of Wisconsin’s schedule difficulty puts Luke Fickell’s 2025 group in an unprecedented position.
Three metrics all point to the Badgers’ 2025 schedule being more difficult than any other UW schedule in at least 20 years.
Looking back since 2005 — a two-decade period that includes Luke Fickell, Paul Chryst, Gary Andersen and Bret Bielema’s entire tenures at the helm along with Barry Alvarez’s last season in a non-interim role — the Badgers never had six foes that were ranked in the preseason coaches poll.
Wisconsin’s 2008, 2016, 2019 and 2024 teams had five preseason-ranked foes on their schedules. The 2024 and 2016 Badgers similarly had three foes ranked in the top 10 to start the season.
When looking at FBS opponents’ combined winning percentage, Wisconsin’s 2025 schedule also stands above the previous two decades of schedules. UW’s 2025 FBS opponents won 64.8% of their games in 2024. The only other times when that exceeded 60% was going into the 2016 season (63.2%) and 2024 season (60.1%).
Opponents’ overall winning percentage is far from a perfect measuring stick, of course. Take 2022 Buffalo and 2016 Northwestern as an example. Overall winning percentage measures a Buffalo team that won its seventh game in the 2022 Camellia Bowl the same way as a seven-win Northwestern team that was tied with playoff-bound Ohio State going into the fourth quarter in 2016 (and defeated then-ranked Pittsburgh in its bowl game).
When looking specifically at how this year’s opponents fared last year against ranked teams, the 2025 schedule separates itself from past seasons. The Badgers’ 2025 opponents went a staggering 23-22 (.511) against teams ranked in the coaches poll last season.
No other UW team since 2005 has faced a schedule anywhere close to that. The only other times when the Badgers’ FBS opponents had a combined winning percentage above .300 against ranked foes in the previous season was 2019 (.353) and 2016 (.326), according to a Journal Sentinel data analysis.
Any discussion of strength of schedule comes with the caveat that preseason rankings are certainly not a perfect gauge of how much success a team will experience in a given season. Arizona State, for example, began the season unranked and ended up at No. 7 in the final coaches poll. Michigan, meanwhile, began the season at No. 8 in the coaches poll and ended the year unranked.
Can Badgers follow the 2016 script?
As arduous as UW’s path to success appears to be in 2025, the 2016 Badgers serve as a case study for a team overcoming what seemed like a brutal schedule at the beginning of the season.
Wisconsin also began that season unranked in the preseason coaches poll and had No. 6 LSU in its season opener. It later had a four-game stretch against Michigan State, Michigan, Ohio State and Iowa — teams ranked No. 11, 8, 5 and 15, respectively, in the preseason coaches poll.
Iowa was unranked by the time Wisconsin faced its Heartland Trophy rival, but the others all were in the top 10 at the time UW played those games. Nebraska was unranked at the beginning of the season, but the Huskers rose to No. 6 in the coaches poll by the time they played the Badgers.
The Badgers were up for the challenge, though, upsetting LSU in Week 1, dominating Michigan State and outlasting Nebraska in overtime en route to an 11-3 season that ended with a Cotton Bowl win.
Of course, it helped that UW had linebacker T.J. Watt, running backs Corey Clement and Dare Ogunbowale and other future NFL talent on that roster.
Whether a similar path is in the cards with possible playmakers like Dilin Jones or Mason Reiger will be more clear soon as the season gets underway.
The first challenge against a ranked foe — or first of the “opportunities” — looms a couple weeks away when UW visits No. 8 Alabama on Sept. 13.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin has one of college football’s toughest schedules in 2025. Is it the Badgers’ toughest ever?
Reporting by John Steppe, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
