Where are the Badgers better now than under Paul Chryst leads our Wisconsin football Q&A

After each Wisconsin football game this season, we'll answer your questions about the game and the team. Here is the review of the Badgers' 15-6 loss to Iowa Saturday at Camp Randall Stadium.

Hmmm. The place-kicking is definitely better. Nathanial Vakos is having a great season. The jump from the Mid-American Conference to the Big Ten hasn’t bothered him so far. The team is deeper at receiver. Junior Bryson Green and sophomore Will Pauling have come in as transfers and made immediate impacts. Beyond that it’s really too soon to answer that question. It's hard to point to overall improvement at this point, but is anything worse? Remember last year was not a good season. At this point last year the Badgers were sitting at 1-3 in the Big Ten and struggled so much that a coaching change was made midseason.

New coaches are like recruits. Everyone gets excited about the new guy and focuses on the warts of the one who was replaced. The excitement fans and media had surrounding Luke Fickell was warranted. Cincinnati, until about the last 15-20 years, has been a tough place to building a winning program. Fickell won 76% of his games over five seasons and took the team to the college football playoffs. Who wouldn't be excited about that hire? It’s easy to look wistfully back at the Paul Chryst Era now, but there was a lot of dissatisfaction with UW’s offense and quarterback development under his watch.

Fickell was asked if the offense is still trying to find what its identity should be. His response: “No, I don't think they're trying to find what their identity needs to be. I think we're trying to find how it fits with the people we have as much as anything.” The struggle for a new coaching staff to find the right fit for the players it inherited is one of the challenges a first-year staff and it can be especially difficult when the offense changes as drastically as UW's has from one year to the next. It’s very optimistic to think they’d have a complete handle on that after six games.

More: Iowa's staff stuck with a winning formula; Wisconsin's staff still searching for one

Center Jake Renfro hasn’t been listed on the availability report the past couple of weeks. Practice isn’t open during the season, but my guess is that he has been working his way back into form. He missed most of the spring practice and fall camp and he missed almost all of last season (knee). It would be asking a lot of him to come back and join the starting lineup immediately. It has been a few weeks since Fickell said that Renfro was close to returning to action. We’ll see what happens this week. If/when he is able to return to the lineup, it would allow Tanor Bortolini to move back to guard, which is probably his best position.

The cupboard wasn’t left bare, but as I noted in an earlier answer, this team wasn’t a world-beater last season, hence the 7-6 record. There is a challenge at this point between connecting the scheme UW wants to run with the talents of the players on the roster.

I didn’t take this question seriously, but for those wondering, Fickell has a seven-year deal. There is a reason why these coaching contracts are so long. It takes time to implement schemes and recruit the players that it requires for them. A fair evaluation can’t be made in just six weeks. It's going to take a couple of years to see how the new staff is really doing. That's not what fans want to hear after failing to score a touchdown against Iowa, but it's the truth.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin football Q&A: Where has Luke Fickell improved the Badgers