After a week of uninterrupted debate, the question no longer is whether the University of Wisconsin football team can rebound from consecutive last-minute losses.
No, what people want to know is who the 19th-ranked Badgers are playing today at Camp Randall Stadium.
So without further ado, today’s Big Ten Conference mystery guests are — drum roll, please — the Purdue Boilermakers.
Apologies to coach Danny Hope and the Boilers, who are showing signs of recovery after two down seasons, but they haven’t exactly been the No. 1 topic of conversation around here. UW’s no-longer-dreamy season has been front and center, with everyone from the head coach to the wing blocker on the punt team coming under intense scrutiny.
That’s what happens when you give up miraculous, late-game touchdown passes twice in eight days and go from national championship contender to a team that needs help just to make the Big Ten championship game.
Given the difficulty of the venues, the quality of the opponents and the closeness of the games, UW’s prime-time losses at Michigan State and Ohio State normally wouldn’t be cause for such alarm. The similarities between the games, however, and the repetitive nature of the game-altering mistakes made by the Badgers has left people wondering what happened to the BCS-bound team that steamrolled through its first six games.
The assignment and communication breakdowns that cost the Badgers so dearly in both games generally have not been an issue since UW experienced a program-wide epiphany following the 2008 season. Since then, coach Bret Bielema has demanded — and received — accountability from everyone in the program.
At first glance, the repeated mistakes of the last two weeks indicate a certain level of sloppiness has crept back into the program, that attention to detail has slipped. After all, accountability doesn’t mean a team, especially a team of college kids, never makes mistakes, only that it quickly fixes the ones it does make.
“I would say that our team as a group, especially by our leaders, have high accountability,” Bielema said. “That’s what’s going to help us rebound and come back after these two losses.”
