The 2016 season wasn’t as great as the 2017 season for the Wisconsin Badgers football program, but it was loaded with great moments. The season-opening win over LSU was immensely satisfying and validating. The season-ending Cotton Bowl win might have come against Western Michigan, a “no-glory” assignment in a New Year’s Six game against the Group of Five champion (somewhat akin to what Penn State faces this December against Memphis), but it was still a New Year’s Six bowl win. Those are always moments to cherish.
In the 2016 season, there was one other moment which stood out from the rest, a moment important enough to highlight in our review of great Wisconsin achievements in the 2010s. The 30-6 beatdown of the Michigan State Spartans in East Lansing reverberates through the Big Ten landscape today.
When Wisconsin and Michigan State played on that sun-drenched, late-September afternoon in 2016, Wisconsin was ranked 11th and MSU No. 8. Michigan State was riding high, having just won on the road at Notre Dame and coming off a 2015 season in which it made the College Football Playoff, having won the Big Ten title over Iowa in Indianapolis. Michigan State had won the Big Ten and the Rose Bowl in the 2013 season. Two years later, MSU reached the playoff and climbed over Ohio State in Columbus to do it, dethroning the defending national champions and making their own powerful statement. Mark Dantonio was at the height of his powers. Michigan State was the 1-B in the Big Ten compared to Ohio State’s 1-A. Wisconsin was the third-best program in the conference, a cut below the Buckeyes AND the Spartans in the Big Ten pecking order.
What happened in that 24-point win over Michigan State reflects more on the Spartans, in a sense, than the Badgers. Yes, this victory put Wisconsin on track to win 11 games, a division title, and a New Year’s Six bowl, sustaining the Paul Chryst era and forming an on-ramp to the brilliant 2017 season which would follow. Yet, in many ways, this game marked a turning point more for Michigan State than UW… and not in a good way. Michigan State did win 10 games in 2017, but that has become the aberration, not the norm, for the Spartans.
The blowout loss to Wisconsin in early 2016 led to a disastrous domino effect for Dantonio, whose team plummeted to 3-9. Michigan State has lost at least six games in each of the past two seasons (bowl game included), and many people in and around the Big Ten feel that Dantonio is on his last legs. His program clearly doesn’t have the strength or resilience it once owned.
Wisconsin clearly weakened Michigan State’s program in 2016. It didn’t deliver a finishing blow, but it began a process of erosion which is in evidence to this day. Few in the college football industry would be shocked if 2020 is Dantonio’s last season on the job.
Michigan State hasn’t been back to the Big Ten Championship Game since 2015. It hasn’t returned to a New Year’s Six game. It hasn’t kept up in the Big Ten, whereas Wisconsin has supplanted the Spartans as the second-most successful team in the conference, with Penn State also having an argument to make on that front. Wisconsin and Ohio State have met in two of the last three Big Ten Championship Games, and the Badgers are playing in their third New Year’s Six game in the past four seasons, matching Penn State in that category.
The 2016 Michigan State game will be viewed as an important moment in the story of Big Ten football 20 years from now. Wisconsin authored the story, but its biggest development affected the team the Badgers bludgeoned.