Yeah, I have very little confidence in this Badger team. I think Minnesota is a typically solid middle-of-the-old-Big-Ten-pack team. The Badgers do not appear to be. As has been pointed out elsewhere, they seem very Jeckyl and Hyde, given their convincing wins and their gross losses. I guess they played Penn State and Oregon pretty strong at home, notwithstanding the losses, so there is some reason to think they will look better at Camp Randall than they did in Lincoln. But Minnesota will grind away, and Wisconsin hasn't beaten a team that consistently does that.
I hope the Badgers suprise me, but my guess is that the bowl streak ends.
I think you are overly down on the Badgers. They got screwed by the schedule gods.
HFA is hard to understand because it isn't the same thing for all teams. HFA is most beneficial in the most closely matched games. Thus, if your team is really good, you want your best opponents at home. Ie, this season:
- If you are Oregon you want Ohio State at home. Oregon actually got their best two B1G opponents at home and beat tOSU by 1 and Illinois by 29.
- If you are Purdue you want your worst opponents at home.
- If you are middling Wisconsin you want other middling teams at home.
Wisconsin's schedule sucked because they got HFA in a bunch of games where it didn't do them any good:
- They got Oregon at home and lost by three.
- They got Penn State at home and lost by 15.
- They got Purdue at home and won by 45.
My argument is that HFA didn't help the Badgers in any of those games.
Then they played on the road and lost at Iowa, USC, and Nebraska. Given that none of those games were particularly close maybe it didn't matter but I'd like UW's chances a lot better in Madison. I also like their chances against Minnesota in Madison.
Wisconsin has some really good performances. Losing to Oregon by 3 is the second best game against Oregon this year behind only Ohio State's losing by one. Beating Purdue by 46 is the best performance this year against Purdue, up there with tOSU (45), PSU (39 in W. Laf), and Ore (35 in W. Laf). My point is that when UW plays well, they are close to the top-4. The problem is that when they play poorly they are close to the bottom three.
