Wisconsin 2017 Season Thread

[847badgerfan]

Wisconsin and UCLA have announced a two-game, home-and-home series that will see the two teams play at the Rose Bowl on Sept. 15, 2029 and at Camp Randall Stadium on Sept. 7, 2030.

[ELA]

Wisconsin and UCLA have announced a two-game, home-and-home series that will see the two teams play at the Rose Bowl on Sept. 15, 2029 and at Camp Randall Stadium on Sept. 7, 2030.

Safely after football no longer exists.

[847badgerfan]

Maybe they will play flag football.


What this proves once and for all it that UCLA is definitely not a helmet, because OOC helmets don't come to Madison.

[847badgerfan]

Excerpts from Jesse Temple:
*************



Former UW-Madison Chancellor Donna Shalala may have best summed up the state of the Badgers' football program in the late 1980s. 



"I think the people had given up. I actually think they had given up on the chance that Wisconsin would ever be a contender again. There was a generation of people that only knew losing."



And then the Barry Alvarez era began.



Quoted (numerous times) in the article is Matt Lepay, Wisconsin's radio announcer since 1988: "I remember the famous (Alvarez) line. 'You'd better get your season tickets now because before long, you might not be able to.' I remember thinking, 'Boy this guy is pretty confident in himself.' And in my own mind, I'd only been here two years, was here for '88, '89, so I thought, 'I wonder if he knows what he's getting into because it was a mess.'"



Alvarez:



"We went through tough times. We stuck with it. We never compromised who we were and what we were all about. I told people from Day 1, you can go back and read it. I told them just be patient. We're going to build on a good foundation, and we've been good ever since. For us to go to six Rose Bowls from '94 through two years ago, that's unbelievable. And three of them in the '90s? Win three championships? From the shittiest program, maybe in the country, to three Rose Bowls in the '90s? That's ridiculous."

[Mdot21]

He tore a pectoral muscle in the Iowa game - and played through it until he couldn't. Then he missed the rest of the season.


PC is thinking they will apply for a medical redshirt for this coming season so he can play next year.


Chris Orr and TJ Edwards will be the likely starters in the middle now. They may have anyway as there was some talk about moving "Three Sack Jack" Cichy outside.

IMO- he's good enough and has shown enough that if he dedicates to rehab and coming back healthy he's better off just busting his ass now to preparing for the NFL Combine and draft interview process and he'll get drafted. Not worth the risk. Jeremy Clark was nowhere near the player this kid is and he still got drafted after tearing his ACL.

[FearlessF]

Wisconsin and UCLA have announced a two-game, home-and-home series that will see the two teams play at the Rose Bowl on Sept. 15, 2029 and at Camp Randall Stadium on Sept. 7, 2030.

Bravo!

[Entropy]

http://www.omaha.com/huskers/football/mckewon-in-wild-big-ten-west-stability-wins-and-that/article_2c179dcb-b131-5601-8ace-820c6c41f071.html

OWH has Wisky winning the west

[847badgerfan]

In a very interesting development, Paul Chryst has named true freshman Jack Coan as the backup QB for this season.


I know coaches like to redshirt freshman QB's but from the way he played in Spring and in camp, they couldn't hold him back.


I guess RS frosh Kare Lyles is going to have to think about what he wants to do. With his dad being a former Badger and his younger brother being an OL on the team now, perhaps he will stay and grasp another position.


Time will tell, but he's young and he got passed up already.

[Brutus Buckeye]

The Cougars have one of the nation’s nastiest linebacking corps, a great defense overall, and a veteran QB in Tanner Mangum who should hold up well under the Badger defensive pressure.
[/size][/color]Wisconsin will go 11-1 with the puck on its stick in the Big Ten Championship to go to the College Football Playoff with a win. But BYU will be the blemish.[/font]




-Pete Fiutak


http://collegefootballnews.com/2017/08/5-stupid-college-football-predictions-2017-michigan-usc-byu-wisconsin-colorado

[847badgerfan]

Heh. Pete is a Badger alum...


I'm more concerned about the altitude in Provo than I am about the team in Provo. We'll see.


But good thing the DL and LB positions are very deep. That will help.

[847badgerfan]

I really like this article (found on a Badger team board called Buckyville)

Cal football: Overlooked but vital line on Justin Wilcox’s resume: Wisconsin, 2016
Jon Wilner, The Mercury News
September 2, 2017
 
Justin Wilcox’s background seemed ideal for the position:

* Played for, and graduated from, Oregon.

* Three years as a Cal assistant coach.

* Experience as a defensive coordinator for three of the top programs in the west (USC, Boise State and Washington).

* Recruiting connections throughout the Bay Area and California.

As Cal took a deep dive into Wilcox’s candidacy to replace ousted coach Sonny Dykes, it was difficult to imagine a line on his resume could be of equal or greater relevance than those four.

Except it existed: One year as the defensive coordinator at Wisconsin.
Madison and Berkeley, Badgers and Bears, admissions bars and offensive lines — the parallels were unmistakable.

“We were talking to Justin as we developed a profile of what we were looking for,’’ said Cal senior associate athletic director Chris Pezman, who ran the search to replace Sonny Dykes.

“He had a sense of what we can and can’t be. It was a combination of him having been at Cal and his Wisconsin experience.”

It might seem odd that 50 weeks as a defensive coordinator in the Big Ten — and not at Michigan or Ohio State, by the way — would have done more to prepare Wilcox for the task in Berkeley than all the years spent at Washington, USC and, to a lesser extent, Boise State.

Certainly, those experiences allowed him to forge recruiting connections with high schools up and down the west coast. But Cal officials saw in Wisconsin a fraternal twin in foundational matters, from style of play and recruiting philosophy to academic demands and admissions standards.

One particular situation made a deep impression on Pezman.

In the summer of 2015, the Badgers denied admission to the top prospect in their freshman class, running back Jordan Stevenson. The reported reason: He didn’t meet Wisconsin’s admissions requirements.

“It resonated with me,” Pezman said. “With our admissions, certain kids are not going to be successful here.”

Nor was Stevenson an isolated case for the Badgers. In the deeply-wired world of  college football administration — Pezman’s world — it was well known that Wisconsin periodically denied admission to prospects who would clear the bar at many powerhouse programs.

The parallel: 80 percent of Cal freshmen must have a high school grade-point average of 3.0 or better.

“A lot of places sell their soul; Wisconsin doesn’t do that,’’ Pezman said. “There was a correlation for some of the things we face here.’’

Wilcox hadn’t yet joined Wisconsin’s staff when the Stevenson situation unfolded. But the year spent in Madison, combined with his prior experience in Berkeley under Jeff Tedford (2003-05), allowed him to articulate to Cal officials a vision for recruiting — for players who could thrive on the field and in the classroom.

 “We’re not going to recruit everybody that’s a really good player,’’ Wilcox said. “Most high school players say they want a great academic institution, and then you look at the transcript and think, ‘Do you?’

“It’s about what you’re looking for as a program. For us, I think it’s an advantage because this is such a great institution. The guys that matters to who are good players, that’s who we want.

“Do you scratch people off the list because of the academic environment here? Yeah, but we’re good with it.”

There are other similarities.

Just as Wisconsin has found its place in a conference dominated by Michigan and Ohio State, so must Cal navigate a world with programs that have richer traditions, larger fan bases and more fertile local recruiting grounds.

Just as Wisconsin has developed an on-field identity designed to take maximum advantage of its recruiting pool (think: offensive linemen built like farmhouses), so must Cal create a schematic model suited to the players it can best attract.

Pezman and Wilcox have a framework in mind, and it looks nothing like the Bear Raid.

The roster built by Dykes leaned too heavily on recruits from other regions and was overly reliant on receivers at the expense of other positions: Offensive line, for instance.

With the exception of quarterbacks, offensive linemen are typically the smartest players on the roster; they need the processing power to work cohesively while making split-second adjustments.

Wilcox, 40, doesn’t plan to turn the Bears into the Badgers (or into Stanford, which plays a similar style). But he believes there’s a middle ground. And it looks much like the ground Cal staked out under Tedford.

“It’s the Pro Style attack that utilizes guys who can make decisions quick and handle more than one thing — making that an advantage to us,’’ said Wilcox, whose team opens the season Saturday at North Carolina.

“My experience with coach Tedford was invaluable in terms of looking at what the best teams looked like, who did we lean on, and where did those guys come from.’’

If the Tedford years provided a schematic model for Wilcox, his season under Wisconsin coach Paul Chryst was a lesson in program management.

“I’ve worked with some great people and learned from all of them’’ — Wilcox noted his years with Chris Petersen at Boise State — “but I identify with (Chryst) so much.

“You hire people to do a job, define the job, then let them do their job. The amount of communication between the coaches and the support staff at Wisconsin was exceptional because nobody was afraid to communicate.

“In terms of a great person and a coach, I’m not sure there’s a better combination.”

I asked Wilcox if Chryst had offered any parting advice. He laughed and shook his head: The communication is ongoing, he noted, just as the experience was invaluable.

“I always thought a lot of my time here,’’ Wilcox said of the Berkeley years. “It’s a really good school with good kids and a great area.

“Then, going there and seeing that it’s an academic institution, maybe not to this caliber, but it’s very academic — and they can both win.

“And it’s important that they do. The last thing I want to do here is devalue the degree.”
 

[847badgerfan]

WTF...

************************

MADISON -- Wisconsin's defense has lost another key player to injury.

According to a source, veteran defensive end Chikwe Obasih suffered a knee injury Wednesday morning during practice.

He isn’t expected to play Saturday against visiting Florida Atlantic and his status beyond that is to be determined.

The injury does not appear to be season-ending, however.

[847badgerfan]

From uwbadgers.com:

MADISON, Wis. – Wisconsin's football game against Florida Atlantic at 11 a.m. CT on Saturday in Camp Randall Stadium will be played as scheduled. FAU is scheduled to arrive in Madison on Friday, ahead of the potential landfall of Hurricane Irma in south Florida.

 "The health and safety of the student-athletes is always our first priority and our discussions with FAU centered around just that," Wisconsin Director of Athletics Barry Alvarez said.

 "The decision was made to keep the game as originally scheduled since their travel to Madison will not be impacted. If the situation arises where FAU's travel home is impacted, we are prepared to help in any way possible. We've discussed a number of contingencies, from paying for extra nights of hotel rooms to opening up our facilities for them to use for practice, sports medicine care, meals or anything else they may need.

 "We've seen the devastation that these storms can inflict and our thoughts are with all those who may be affected."

[FearlessF]

better to be in Madison than Florida this weekend

remember that when you take the yacht out of the great lake and float around the Florida Keys