Governance: The collapse of Badger football is not a football story
Transcript, slides & audio:
On October 1 at the Pyle Center, UW–Madison economist Ananth Seshadri gave a talk with a deliberately provocative title and a serious argument underneath it. Wisconsin went from nine wins in 2021 to four in 2025. He doesn’t think the explanation is play-calling.
His case is that the university has a pattern. Wisconsin built the winning football model of the 1990s by finding undervalued players, developing them and keeping them. Then the rules changed: schools can pay players directly and players can transfer freely. The old advantage stopped working, and the response was slow.
He argues the same slowness shows up elsewhere. Indiana built the Kelley School while Wisconsin’s business school sank. Wisconsin founded a computer science department in 1964 and was still reorganizing its structure decades after the market moved. Tuition has been frozen by statute for years, which he calls a price control. Capital projects run through a state process that takes years longer than it takes peers to build.
Football, in his telling, is just the version everyone can see. If an economics department loses five faculty, nobody notices. If a football team loses, 80,000 people do.
His proposals are institutional: let prices rise, move money toward where demand actually is, give athletics the ability to borrow and decide quickly, and be honest about who carries the risk.
The full transcript is online with all 93 slide photographs placed where they were taken, plus the audio. Select any timestamp to hear that moment of the talk.
Readers may find Marc Eisen’s coverage of David Krakauer’s time at the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery worth a look.
