Barry Alvarez reacts to Wisconsin AD Chris McIntosh’s swift departure

MADISON – Count Barry Alvarez among those who were surprised when news broke of Chris McIntosh’s resignation as Wisconsin’s athletic director.

“I found out probably when the rest of the public found out,” Alvarez said on ESPN Madison and ESPN Milwaukee’s “Wilde and Tausch” show. “Mac called me later that day after it had been announced. But I was surprised, like everyone else. Why wouldn’t you be surprised? Who would anticipate that move?”

Alvarez – an obvious advocate for McIntosh to get the job when he retired in 2021 – said the Badgers now “just move forward” in his first public comments since his successor’s abrupt departure to become the Big Ten’s deputy commissioner for strategy.

“It’s a great job,” Alvarez said. “It’s a wonderful job. And it’s a job that a number of highly qualified people would want, and I’m sure the candidate list will be plentiful.”

Asked what Alvarez’s advice would have been to McIntosh if he called before leaving, it would be, “Why would you want to leave?”

“Only he can answer that,” Alvarez said. “Are you not happy? Are you concerned? What does the league bring? What advantage is it that working for the Big Ten brings? Those are all questions that you have to answer if you want to uproot your family, move to Chicago. … But that’s his business.”

Alvarez clarified that he is “not disappointed that he left.”

“That’s his choice,” Alvarez said of the successor that he personally prepared for the job. “If he doesn’t want to be the athletic director, that’s great. We’ll move on. We’ll have a number of great candidates. I think it’s a tremendous job.”

Former Wisconsin athletic director and football coach Barry Alvarez sits between Mary and Ted Kellner during a program recognizing donors for the Kellner Center Athletic Center.

The outlook for the football program will be one of the biggest challenges for whomever follows McIntosh on a permanent basis. (Marcus Sedberry – the deputy AD and football general manager – is the interim AD.) The Badgers are coming off back-to-back losing seasons for the first time since the early 1990s.

“Football runs the athletic department,” Alvarez said. “That’s your revenue source. And you can’t hide from that. If you start – if you continue to have losing seasons, those stands thin out. Revenue is down. The other sports – their budgets aren’t quite what they want them to be. And the whole thing slides. So you got to have football, and I have confidence in Luke [Fickell].”

Leadership uncertainty could be another, as UW also seeks a permanent chancellor and a president for the Universities of Wisconsin system. But Alvarez said that the chancellor “has nothing to do with the football program other than supporting.”

Other challenges may include the Badgers’ competitiveness in Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) that supplements the $20.5 million revenue-sharing cap. McIntosh had said he heard anecdotally that peers were spending another $10 million to $20 million “on top of that to have a successful football program.”

“You have the same rules as everyone else, and it’s your job to figure it out, just like it is for every other team in the Big Ten and every other team in the country,” Alvarez said in the radio interview. “You got to figure it out. … There are no excuses in athletics. You either get it done or you don’t.”

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Barry Alvarez reacts to Wisconsin AD Chris McIntosh’s swift departure