“Hitting for the cycle,” as you know, is a baseball expression referring to a player who hits a single, double, triple, and home run in the same game. In this piece, I’m going to twist that term and apply it to something different.
The calendar year is one kind of year. The fiscal year is another kind of year. The academic year is yet another kind of year. An academic year contains what is generally known as a college sports cycle. The college sports cycle starts in the late summer for the autumnal sports, featuring football. It continues with the winter sports, and concludes with the spring sports, the last big event being the College World Series in Omaha in late June.
During Final Four week, it is worth recalling the times when Wisconsin stacked a brilliant basketball season on top of an excellent football season. Given that the basketball program went 47 years — 1947 to 1994 — without making the NCAA Tournament, there aren’t a ton of seasons in which Wisconsin reached the top of the heap in both basketball and football. A few seasons obviously come to mind as foremost examples of Wisconsin thriving in a particular college sports cycle.
Yet, only one rises above the others.
The 1998-1999 college sports cycle leaned to the football side for Wisconsin. The 1999 Badger basketball team made that year’s NCAA Tournament, but it lost in the first round. The 1998 football team won the 1999 Rose Bowl over UCLA.
The 2014-2015 college sports cycle elevated the basketball program more than the football program. Football was good: The Badgers reached the Big Ten Championship Game by winning the Big Ten West title. However, the Badgers were destroyed by Ohio State in a game — it was later revealed — Gary Andersen really had no interest coaching. He was already halfway out the door to Oregon State. The 2015 Badger basketball team produced the most stirring postseason run in school history, capped by the biggest win in school annals, taking down the 38-0 Kentucky Wildcats at the Final Four.
The 2014 Final Four team for Wisconsin is historically significant. In that college sports cycle, however, the 2013 Badger football team went 9-4, which was unremarkable.
If one was to pick the best college sports cycle — combining a football result in the fall with a basketball result in late winter — in Badger history, there are only two acceptable answers.
One is the 1993-1994 cycle. The football team won the cathartic, exhilarating, unforgettable Rose Bowl game against UCLA, changing Badger football forever. For many Wisconsin fans, that game remains the height of the program’s existence, the memory which is treasured above all others. The basketball team made the second round of the NCAA Tournament, which seems like a modest feat in light of what has happened in the subsequent 26 years, but was huge when considering that Wisconsin hadn’t been to the Big Dance since 1947. That 1993-1994 college sports cycle was enormously important in the larger course of UW sports history. I will certainly accept and welcome any claim that this was the greatest Wisconsin Badger sports cycle of all time.
However, I will side with the other realistic and legitimate answer: The 1999-2000 college sports calendar marked the one time when Wisconsin truly “hit for the cycle.”
This was, very simply, the only time in Badger history that Wisconsin’s football team won a Rose Bowl and its basketball team reached the Final Four three months later.
It didn’t happen in 1941. It didn’t happen in 2014 or 2015. It only happened in January and then early April of the year 2000. Barry Alvarez coached UW to a Rose Bowl win over Stanford in Pasadena. Months later, Dick Bennett guided Wisconsin to the Final Four with an Elite Eight win over Purdue in Albuquerque.
The Granddaddy in early winter, the Final Four in early spring. This was the one time Wisconsin “hit for the cycle.” The seven months from Labor Day through April Fools’ Day were never as sweet or successful for the Wisconsin Badgers as they were at the end of one millennium and the beginning of the next.