MADISON, Wis. — Kenny Guiton, who recently finished his first season as Wisconsin’s wide receivers coach, is taking over as the quarterbacks coach, a source with knowledge of the situation confirmed to The Athletic. The Badgers will now work quickly to hire a new receivers coach.
The shift for Guiton comes after he spent the final two weeks of the regular season coaching both wide receivers and quarterbacks following the dismissal of offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach Phil Longo. Guiton earned widespread praise from players for how he handled both roles.
Guiton has spent the majority of his coaching career working with wide receivers at Houston, Louisiana Tech, Colorado State, Arkansas and Wisconsin. But he played quarterback at Ohio State from 2009-13 when Wisconsin coach Luke Fickell was on the Buckeyes staff. He also served as the interim offensive coordinator at Arkansas in 2023 after coordinator Dan Enos was fired eight games into the regular season.
Fickell opted this offseason to hire a separate offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach, which is a shift from his initial approach at Wisconsin. He brought in Jeff Grimes from Kansas last month to be his offensive coordinator. Grimes has a background as an offensive line coach and a run game coordinator but not with quarterbacks.
Fickell discussed the value of adding a coach to work specifically with the quarterbacks during an interview last month on 97.3 FM The Game.
“That was an emphasis for us,” Fickell said. “I just thought that an ability to kind of go a version of the NFL model now that you have an opportunity to technically have a few more coaches and they’re not limited to what they can do on the football field or in meetings to find a way to better develop quarterbacks.
“If you can get some guys into your program where you can spend more of an emphasis on a true quarterback coach developing them as opposed to 50, 60, 70 percent of his time having to be the leader, coordinate the offense, do all these other things, this gives us a great opportunity to help develop that position, which is so key and critical in all that we’re doing.”
Guiton will take over an overhauled quarterback position from the one he worked with in late November. All four scholarship quarterbacks from last season have transferred out of the program: Tyler Van Dyke, Braedyn Locke, Mabrey Mettauer and Cole LaCrue.
Wisconsin has added a pair of transfers in Billy Edwards Jr. from Maryland and Danny O’Neil from San Diego State. Edwards has one year of eligibility remaining while O’Neil has three. Both players started for their previous schools. Freshman Carter Smith, a four-star prospect in the 2025 recruiting class, will be an early enrollee and give the Badgers three scholarship quarterbacks for spring practice. Walk-on Milos Spasojevic is the only holdover from last season.
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