MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin interim athletic director Marcus Sedberry doesn’t know how long he might have this title.
Nor is he worrying much about that.
Sedberry is concentrating more on the present as he settles into his new position after Chris McIntosh’s surprise departure.
“I don’t have a clear picture there, and if I’m honest with you, it is better for me to focus on the here and the now,” Sedberry said during a media session Thursday. “What I know is I have, let’s call it 900 people who are looking for a leader to lead them right now. Whether that’s going to be three months, a year, whatever that’s going to be, it’d be challenging trying to live in the what ifs and uncertainty of what that is.”
Sedberry was named interim athletic director on April 13 after McIntosh left to accept a newly created position as the Big Ten’s deputy commissioner for strategy. McIntosh had been Wisconsin’s athletic director since the summer of 2021.
Sedberry had been working as Wisconsin’s deputy athletic director/chief operating officer since 2022. He wasn’t specific on exactly when he learned he’d be taking over, though he said that Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin was the person who notified him about it.
Eric Wilcots, Wisconsin’s interim chancellor-designate, is leading the search to select McIntosh’s permanent successor because Mnookin is leaving July 1 to become Columbia University’s president. Sedberry was noncommittal Thursday regarding whether he’d like to have the job on a permanent basis.
“At this point, I haven’t really been addressing that with anybody because I just want to focus on what I have right in front of me,” Sedberry said.
Before coming to Wisconsin, Sedberry was a senior associate athletics director at Baylor. He also has worked at Arkansas and Central Florida as well as with the Philadelphia Eagles.
Sedberry now is running an athletic department that has struggled in football lately while producing plenty of success elsewhere.
Wisconsin won a second straight national title in women’s ice hockey, reached the men’s hockey national championship game and got to the national semifinals in women’s volleyball over the last year. But the football program went 4-8 last year after finishing 5-7 in 2024, snapping what had been a Power Four-leading streak of 22 straight winning seasons.
Since February 2025, Sedberry has been the football program’s general manager, which involved overseeing revenue share and recruiting strategy as well as personnel management and contract negotiations. Those responsibilities will get handed to someone else now that Sedberry is in this new role.
“I think the biggest lesson learned there was just understanding how the landscape is moving right now,” Sedberry said. “I’m grateful to have been in it, to be the one negotiating, to be the one in the conversation talking about how we’re going to build a roster, what that looks like, what we think it’s going to take and then actually filling what it took to do it.”
McIntosh announced late last season that Wisconsin would increase its financial investment in football and that it would stick with coach Luke Fickell. The Badgers have since added 34 transfers, including 27 from other Football Bowl Subdivision programs.
Sedberry was asked Thursday what would constitute a successful 2026 season for the football program.
“We need to win,” Sedberry said. “How many wins that is, I don’t know that I would in this moment right now try to put that number into the universe. I think the reality is we need to win. Luke would tell you we need to win.”
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