Tag: Minnesota Golden Gophers Football

Wisconsin-Minnesota now means even more, thanks to Iowa

Reaction to Iowa beating Minnesota, which makes the Nov. 30 game between the Golden Gophers and the Wisconsin Badgers even bigger.

Thank you, Iowa. That is what the Wisconsin Badgers and their fans are saying after the Hawkeyes ended Minnesota’s dreams of producing an unbeaten season. The 23-19 Iowa triumph in Kinnick Stadium served a very important purpose for Wisconsin: It gave Minnesota one Big Ten loss. Wisconsin, with two Big Ten losses, has been brought back into the Big Ten West title hunt. Wins over Purdue and then Minnesota will give the Badgers another ticket to Indianapolis and a chance to get a (possible, not guaranteed) rematch against Ohio State.

You know Wisconsin wants that rematch. You know Wisconsin wanted the Minnesota game to be a division championship battle. You know Wisconsin needed Minnesota to lose once before Nov. 30 in order for the Badgers to have a realistic chance at going to the Rose Bowl. (Penn State will have a say in this conversation, but that is a separate matter.)

As big as the battle for Paul Bunyan’s Axe always is, and as fierce as the rivalry between Wisconsin and Minnesota — not just the football programs, but the two states — has often been, the Badgers-Gophers clash just got a lot bigger. Thank you, Iowa.

Given how rare Wisconsin and Minnesota have been very good teams at the same time, it is worth cherishing this upcoming battle. The 2016 game was the biggest UW-U of M game in recent memory. Minnesota won nine games that season, including its bowl game. Wisconsin won 11 games.

Before 2016, you would have to go all the way back to 1962 to find a time when both programs were prominent and prosperous. Wisconsin beat Minnesota, 14-9, in the 1962 game between the two schools. The great Badger team quarterbacked by Ron Vander Kelen, which also contained future UW athletic director Pat Richter, went to the 1963 Rose Bowl and played USC in a classic game. Richter, of course, hired Barry Alvarez as head football coach, the most important moment in Wisconsin football history. Wisconsin’s prominence today is rooted in that one decision, which changed everything for football in Madison.

Thank you, Iowa. Wisconsin-Minnesota could be for a ticket to Pasadena. It WILL be for a ticket to Indianapolis, barring a highly improbable UW stumble against Purdue. It is always for the Axe, but this year, it will be for a lot more than that.

Wisconsin’s play vs. Nebraska won’t cut it against Minnesota

An initial reaction to the Wisconsin Badgers’ victory over the Nebraska Cornhuskers.

The Wisconsin Badgers defeated the Nebraska Cornhuskers on Saturday. They won by 16 points. They won without too much drama. Yet, given how flawed the Huskers are, a strong Wisconsin team would have blown the doors off this game. As it was, Nebraska was still in the hunt midway through the fourth quarter. Wisconsin needed a red-zone stop to finally feel good about this game. Until then, the Badgers had to legitimately doubt whether they could put away Nebraska.

That is a problem. Victory should not — and cannot — obscure that reality. Wisconsin handled a bad team well enough to win, but not nearly well enough to inspire confidence about the Nov. 30 matchup against Minnesota on the road. We will continue to unpack various nuances of that game — it’s not as though next week’s Purdue game will offer a hugely revealing insight into the Minnesota contest — but for now, we can simply assert this basic point: Wisconsin’s level of play was nowhere near what Paul Chryst needs it to be against Minnesota.

If the Badgers play like this against the Golden Gophers, they might not merely lose. They might get run out of the building and feel very dissatisfied about the nature of their season. Sure, Minnesota is impressive (we’ll see if the Gophers beat Iowa; this article was written before the start of that game in Iowa City). If the Gophers happen to beat the Badgers by playing a phenomenal game, so be it. Wisconsin can’t control how well Minnesota plays. Wisconsin can control how the Badgers play, and right now, the Badgers aren’t playing particularly well, especially on defense.

Yes, the offense still needs work. Jonathan Taylor can’t keep fumbling (his fumble at Illinois was very costly). Jack Coan has to be more accurate. The offense isn’t a finished product. Yet, the offensive line is knocking the snot out of opposing defensive fronts. Wisconsin can beat Minnesota based on the way the O-line is performing.

On defense, however? Good luck standing up to Minnesota’s speed at wide receiver or the Gophers’ pace, or P.J. Fleck’s scheme. If Nebraska could bust open big holes; if the Huskers could gain first downs with the run on third and seven; if Scott Frost could make Jim Leonhard’s defense look bad for most of the first three quarters; if a 34-14 lead wasn’t entirely safe (and it wasn’t, not with Nebraska being 15 yards from making the score 34-28); and if the back seven was slow to defend a number of downfield pass plays yet again, how will Wisconsin contain Minnesota’s offense?

That question — as we come closer to Nov. 30 — has to dominate coaches’ meetings. It has to be a central talking point on the practice field. It has to be the topic Wisconsin’s defensive players think about. What happened against Nebraska wasn’t acceptable. Victory can’t allow the Badgers’ defense to ignore that point.

Wisconsin fixed problems against Iowa, but will that beat Minnesota?

Considering the Wisconsin Badgers’ situation relative to the Minnesota Golden Gophers after UW’s win over the Iowa Hawkeyes.

Had the Minnesota Golden Gophers not beaten Penn State and made themselves an even bigger target for the Wisconsin Badgers, we wouldn’t be devoting quite as much time or energy to the task of beating the Gophers on Nov. 30. Yet, one can’t work with events as one wishes they would be. One must deal with events as they actually are. It’s called living in the real world.

Minnesota has made itself more of a problem for Wisconsin. It’s not what UW fans wanted, but it is the reality the Badgers must confront. That will be a very hard game to win. Therefore, it is worth spending some of these November days focusing not just on Nebraska and then Purdue, but on P.J. Fleck and his folks. How will the Badgers go into Minneapolis and come away with Paul Bunyan’s Axe?

Based on Wisconsin’s win over the Iowa Hawkeyes this past Saturday, a number of interesting questions and attached tension points have emerged. The question I will explore in this particular piece is as follows: Can Wisconsin win this game simply by eradicating mistakes, or will the Badgers need to push themselves far beyond their limits?

Yes, the best answer is “both,” but let’s be clear before we continue with this brief piece: Against Ohio State (or, to use a non-Big Ten example, LSU or Clemson), it is obvious that Wisconsin and other second-tier teams in the United States have to play way over their heads and make “value-added” plays to have a real chance to win. Is Minnesota that kind of opponent? I am inclined to say “no,” but my opinion doesn’t matter that much. A reasonable middle ground on this question is that while Minnesota certainly isn’t in Ohio State’s league, the Gophers made Penn State look bad for much of this past Saturday’s game and — had they not fumbled when leading by two scores in the third quarter — could have blown the doors off the Nittany Lions.

Minnesota went from being “a team which beats up on the bottom of the Big Ten” to “a team that is for real” against Penn State. Do we know yet if the Gophers are not merely “for real” and “a team to be taken seriously,” but genuinely ELITE? I don’t think so.

The tricky part for Wisconsin: The Badgers can’t use that lack of knowledge to assume they can win merely by avoiding mistakes against the Gophers. This leads us into the heart of this piece, and one of the most fascinating tension points of the game on Nov. 30 in TCF Bank Stadium:

The Badgers’ offense improved when the dumb penalties ceased. Wisconsin’s offense got out of its own way. Its running game flourished when the Badgers weren’t behind schedule. Two plus two equals four.

However, after the offense got out of its own way, the defense allowed a 75-yard touchdown and endured another one of its fourth-quarter swoons, the previous one being against Illinois. We wrote about the problems in the secondary which have allowed that alarming detail to remain part of this team’s identity in the second half of the season.

Imagine, then, if both the offense and the defense spend a full game not making huge mistakes, with the level of performance we saw from Jack Coan (tolerable, but not spectacular). Is that going to be enough against the Gophers? It’s an interesting query. One could go back and forth on that topic.

The strength of the argument rests with the offensive line. If there aren’t any false-start penalties and Jonathan Taylor gets four or more yards per carry, the Badgers could pound Minnesota’s defensive front and turn this game into the trench warfare battle they want. A game based on the elimination of mistakes could be all Wisconsin needs.

The weakness of this argument is based on the awareness of how much speed Minnesota has, not only in relationship to Iowa but to a Wisconsin team which was outflanked at times by Illinois. Keep in mind that if Jack Coan throws the ball against Minnesota the way he did against Iowa, the Gophers’ closing speed in the secondary might turn Wisconsin catches into incompletions on successful pass breakups. Eliminating bad mistakes from the ledger sheet will put Wisconsin in position to win, but that might not be enough to put UW over the top.

Yes, Wisconsin’s offense fixed its problems versus Iowa, and the team in general took a clear step forward from the previous two games. Yet, will that be enough to beat Minnesota? You don’t have to answer that question right away… and that’s part of the point. Wisconsin will have to wrestle with that question over the next few weeks. This is the reality facing the Badgers, now that the Gophers have made themselves such an obstacle, at least in 2019.

The secondary is primary for Wisconsin if it wants to beat Minnesota

A look at the Wisconsin Badgers’ secondary heading into the final stretch of the regular season.

There is a difference between playing poorly and playing “not well enough.” This reality is a good framework to use when assessing the Wisconsin Badgers’ secondary the past few weeks.

Solid and competent through two and a half or three quarters, the Wisconsin secondary has let down its guard in the fourth quarters of recent games against Illinois in October and then this past Saturday against Iowa. The similarities between the two games are very obvious, and they inform how the Badgers need to improve before the clash against the Minnesota Golden Gophers later this month. Beating Minnesota will enable this season to be remembered with a sense of satisfaction. If the Badgers are to build themselves to a point where they can withstand all of P.J. Fleck’s arrows and spears, the secondary — which hasn’t been bad — needs to be a lot better.

If a team or position unit does its job for two and a half or three quarters, it doesn’t deserve extremely low grades, but if that unit has enough lapses in the final 15 to 20 minutes of a game, no one will care how good the first two and a half quarters were. Such was the reality for Wisconsin after the Illinois game. That scenario very nearly unfolded again versus Iowa, but Chris Orr’s tackle on the 2-point conversion spared the Badgers an overtime period and a possible crisis.

Wisconsin led Illinois 20-7 deep into the third quarter. Illinois scored 17 points in the final 16 minutes to win. Wisconsin led Iowa 21-6 after three quarters. Iowa scored 16 points in the final 15 minutes to very nearly forge a tie. The Badgers’ secondary is like LeBron James in his disastrous 2011 NBA Finals series against the Dallas Mavericks: He wasn’t worth a dollar because he always came a quarter short.

LeBron couldn’t solve the fourth quarter in that series, as a member of the Miami Heat. The Mavs raised their game, and LeBron froze instead of becoming sharper in the cauldron of pressure. Something akin to that has happened with the Wisconsin secondary against Illinois and now Iowa. The Badgers gave hardly anything away and put an opposing offense on lockdown for nearly 45 minutes, and then lost the plot in the final 15.

Iowa’s Tyrone Tracy got free on an intermediate/deep-intermediate pass and outraced the Wisconsin defense the rest of the way for a 75-yard touchdown which changed the tone and trajectory of Saturday’s fourth quarter in Camp Randall Stadium. Illinois produced pass plays of 48 and 29 yards against Wisconsin to fuel its comeback. The Illini also got a 43-yard touchdown run in their late rally.

The big pass plays which have struck Wisconsin’s secondary have not been long bombs, either. These are not cases of quarterbacks throwing 50-yard heaves and the receivers outleap Badger cornerbacks. These are intermediate or deep-intermediate throws which involve a long run after the catch is made. Angles, reactions, positioning, and responsibility all enter into these shortcomings. They keep recurring, and they have to be nipped in the bud.

Wisconsin has a 75-cent defense right now. Finding that fourth and final quarter of quality is primary for the Badgers and their secondary.