After the Rose Bowl, we focused on the officiating, which became a big part of the story. Then came the big Ohio State basketball game on Friday, followed by the Army All-American Bowl, the recruiting showcase which involved some Wisconsin news.
Now that the news cycle has calmed down, we can take our time and stretch our legs a little bit at Badgers Wire, reflecting on the 2020 Rose Bowl in a number of installments.
A first big-picture assessment of the 2020 Rose Bowl loss to Oregon is that the 28-27 game simultaneously validated and exposed the Badgers. The game reinforced everything the program tries to do, and it also showed exactly what Wisconsin doesn’t have… and what keeps the Badgers from being a College Football Playoff-level program.
Such is the complexity of Wisconsin football after the 2019 season: The things which make the Badgers such a consistently good team are the things which sometimes (not all the time, but sometimes) keep the program from reaching a higher plateau. The best aspects of Wisconsin football’s identity keep UW from being the very best — better than Ohio State, better than Oregon, better than the elite teams in the sport.
Wisconsin football prides itself on being the more fundamentally sound team than its opponent: blocking, tackling, ball security, ball-control passing, et cetera. Know who you are, know what you do well, do it again and again, wear the opponent down, win with your consistency. That’s Badger football. Wisconsin has cultivated consistency and dependability in the core components of football. The results do speak for themselves; they speak quite loudly and positively about the Badgers’ track record dating back to the 1993 season and everything Barry Alvarez put into motion.
Obviously, if a football identity built on consistency runs up against a boatload of turnovers and several key penalties — which is what occurred in the Rose bowl — that identity isn’t likely to withstand those mistakes. Teams which build themselves on a foundation of avoiding mistakes won’t ordinarily win when making lots of blunders. This doesn’t invalidate the Wisconsin Way of avoiding mistakes; it reinforces it. Imagine how lopsided this game against Oregon could have been if UW committed only one turnover and three or four fewer penalties. It gives Paul Chryst the ability to say — credibly — “We just didn’t do what we normally did. We are what we are… and in the Rose Bowl, we WEREN’T who we normally are.”
That part reinforced Wisconsin’s identity.
Here is what the 2020 Rose Bowl exposed about UW: When the Badgers do make mistakes — when they give away points and possessions — do they have the resources and capacities to overcome flaws?
This is where any football program (or in the NFL, a franchise) has to have a leadership structure and coaching culture which allow for the possibility that winning might need to occur in many different ways, not just one. Bill Belichick has become an iconic and generationally significant football coach because he has won with defense and with offense; with stars and with role players; with conventional AND unconventional approaches. Belichick respects structure, but he knows enough to blow up that structure when it either isn’t working or leaves the New England Patriots vulnerable in a particular way. Belichick wasn’t afraid to move players from offense to defense or vice-versa. He wasn’t reluctant to shift players into unfamiliar roles if that meant shoring up a weakness. The best coaches create flexibility and allow for it in the course of games and seasons. They know what kind of team they would like to have — they embrace an identity — but if they arrive at a game or a moment in which they have to temporarily cast aside that identity and embrace a different way of playing the game, they will do that.
Wisconsin doesn’t do that. It didn’t do that in the Rose Bowl.
Wisconsin has very, very rarely — over the past 27 years of generally strong college football — aired the ball out. The Badgers don’t take a lot of shots down the field. They don’t emphasize the vertical passing game.
No one is saying or suggesting Wisconsin should REGULARLY emphasize deep passing, but within the flow of a game — when it becomes necessary to find a quick strike, or when defenses are taking away either the run or the short pass — the Badgers need to be better about hitting the long ball. Kirk Herbstreit discussed this during the Rose Bowl broadcast.
I actually thought the play selection in the Rose Bowl was good. Wisconsin controlled the ball and got Oregon’s defense off balance with sweeps and misdirection runs in the third quarter. If the Badgers hadn’t fumbled or committed penalties, they would have scored more points. This is not a criticism about specific situations in which Wisconsin could have called one kind of play but instead called another.
This is more about realizing that when a game is close, and/or when Wisconsin trails the opposition (consider the second half against Ohio State in the Big Ten title game), being able to find a quick strike reduces the burden on the offense to produce a 10-play, 75-yard drive. Quick strikes increase a margin for error because they achieve in one play what sometimes takes 10 plays to achieve. It makes the project of winning games less complicated. It takes more variables out of the equation.
Wisconsin won’t win most games this way. It won’t PLAY most games this way… and it shouldn’t try to become something it isn’t.
However, in that one difficult game when it is hard to make a tipping-point play, a willingness to throw the deep ball — and step outside of the normal framework — can be powerfully important.
If Wisconsin had this capacity — and displayed it in the one or two games per season when the “normal way” isn’t as easy to impose on an opponent — it could take the next step as a program.