Must be dipping too heavily from the Packer Kool-aid to notice the Badgers played a ‘ell of a game in the Rose Bowl this evening. I don’t recall seeing much for Pro-Badger hype here on IDO coming up to this game.
Normally I don’t watch College football, but I was glad I tuned in, that was a great game. 
Congrats to the Oregon Ducks. 
Stewin’ on clock management. Those ducks are pretty awesome, that is for sure.
I think we were out coached 
Boys played a heck of a game 
but in the end, I think the ducks were better prepared. 
I figured the Badgers had the offense to hang with their speed but the Badgers defense plain sucks. Wish J.J. Watt would have stayed but he’s great for the Texans. Abbedaris(sp) should have went out of bounds. Always next year but without a great QB. Good season overall.
I’ve been a Bielema hater since day one and take crap for it non stop from the Kool Aid drinkers here in WI. Well, now he’s 2-4 in bowl games and 0-2 in Rose Bowls. I’ll take the 8-3 with multiple Rose Bowls from the Alvarez era.
Yeah yeah yeah, tell me about Don Morton etc… Winning one out of every 3 bowl games and getting out coached on a regular basis is getting old. We’ll see the true Bielema next year when Paul Christ isn’t there to bail him out, and he has no Russel Wilson or Monte Ball.
Badger here, they played a great game just not good enough, still proud of my team . Congrats to the Ducks also, what a Rose Bowl. Now we have to wait and see what next year brings.
Whats wrong with our stupid coach? Way dumb decisions ALL THE TIME. 
X2
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Whats wrong with our stupid coach? Way dumb decisions ALL THE TIME.
The thing that I despise the most about him, is that he was hired because he was a “Defensive Minded Coach”. Borland and Taylor are quality players, the rest of the D sucks. Aaron Henry can’t be gone soon enough.
He had a super lucky int tonight, a tipped ball hit him in the chest, but he also got burned bad for 3 tds tonight.
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We’ll see the true Bielema next year when Paul Christ isn’t there to bail him out, and he has no Russel Wilson or Monte Ball.
I agree 100% with this statement.
It was a very good game to watch. Congrats to the Ducks.
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We’ll see the true Bielema next year when Paul Christ isn’t there to bail him out, and he has no Russel Wilson or Monte Ball.
I agree 100% with this statement. It was a very good game to watch. Congrats to the Ducks.
However, myself being a HUSKER Fan, I can’t say much as we keep shooting ourselves in the foot, then the knee, then the gut, and finally in the headFOROUT LOUD!
Hopefully next year they can get a “head-out of A$$ectomy” and make a better showing.
2 Turnovers in the 4th are not going to get the job done when you are the underdog… 
I was impressed they were in the game, as I have seen their defense a couple times this year and they really remind me of the Packers on the college level.
Bielema never has been very good at managing the clock and the use of time outs in big games. He showed that yet again in this game.
Congrats to the Ducks though. Their team speed is truly incredible.
Great game. I was pissed we didnt get to see the last play. well, we did but you know what i mean. Too bad for the kid that tried to get an extra yard and fumbled.
I’ve watched a lot of football in my day. That ducks team is one of the best I’ve ever seen. JJ Watt would have made a huge difference. We were outcoached, and out athleted but I didn’t see any quit on that field from anyone. Great example for my kids. You have to like they way both teams battled. You simply can’t give up 95 yard touchdown runs and win. You can’t get baited into a Charles Woodson style picks. I think if we lined both teams up for a 50 yard dash, position by position, the Ducks would’ve won every race.
Bucky Fan here since 1969 when we were fighting Northwestern for number 1 in Playboy’s “Bottom Ten” and the “Best Party School” in the Nation!!! I remember getting tickets during John Coatta’s reign and running around Camp Randall pre-Don Morton when they were lucky to get a 40,000 fans in the stadium and beating Iowa to end a 21 game losing streak was enough to send the students to State Street starting bonfires to celebrate while cops roasted marshmallows making sure it didn’t get violent.
I don’t see our loss as being any worse than any other of the Big Ten teams so far. And I can’t believe that we are nitpickin’ here, Bielema’s time-out on the goal line made sense and I am assuming that many of the tv watchers didn’t know that rule and he wanted time to see if it was right or not. That time-out was the crucial one though.
I have source pretty close to the team in the athletic department and they say that his players are better students and generally less likely to get into trouble off the field. Last year we get beat in the Rose Bowl on a 2 point conversion against one of the top two rookie QB’s in the NFL this year. And I think with a different outcome on two plays this year we were in the conversation to play for the National Championship. IMHO his teams have gotten consistently better and I am not sure what more you could ask from a coach. And until we are playing for a national championship I am pretty happy to be playing in the bowl games we have been playing in.
As for the rest… As Lombardi used to say, “We didn’t lose today, We just ran out of time!!!”
Just my .02 cents
Mark
Well, look at it this way. Alvarez handed Bielema the keys to a made program. 8-3 Bowl game record, multiple Rose Bowls, started his first season with Barrys players at 12-1.
Since then he has won 1 of the last 5 bowl games, and only two of those were BCS games, so he’s 2-2 in non BCS games (not impressing me). He’s a “defensive minded coach”, whos defense seems to get worse every year (save for the occaisional special player like JJ Watt, who by the way transfered as a tight end and was not a BB recruit)..
Here’s the kicker, the Big 10 is down. Look at the Big 10 bowl records over the Bielema era. The Big 10 hasn’t been a true Power conference during his tenure, so conference titles don’t mean as much when your conference wins 1 or 2 bowl games per year.
If you’re happy with mediocracy and one outback or Capital one bowl win every 3 years, then he’s your guy.
If you want somebody who doesn’t constantly blow time outs, make stupid decisions (like spiking the ball with 02 seconds left), then he’s not your guy. Let’s look this post up next year when Christ, Ball and Wilson are gone. I bet you $50 we won’t be talking about them in the Rose Bowl.
I work at the UW and one thing I know for sure is that the guys on our Badger team are definitely classy people. Players that I feel proud of regardless of whether or not we won the Rose Bowl. Bielema does and excellent job of recruiting both players and coaches with strong character.
The only knock I have on Bielema is his clock management. Other than that, he has represented the Football team and the University very, very well.
I had two older brothers who played for the Badgers in the late 60’s and early 70’s. We were terrible back then. It was not unusual to lose to Ohio St and Michigan by a score of 66-6 or worse.
The Don Morton era was the low point though. Let’s hope we never end up in that boat again.
I really can’t see much to complain about. No team is going to win the Big Ten every year regardless of how good they are. That’s just the way it is.
Bielema needs to keep recruiting like he has, find some good coaches to fill the holes left by departing coaches and get better at game management.
Go Badgers! 
My main problem with BB is that he’s been coaching the Badgers for 6 years, and is still making these same stupid mistakes. Look at the Ohio State game, that time out was just about the worst thing that could have happened.
Why after 6 years of making the same mistakes does he get a pass? Ohio State does expect to win the Big 10 title every year. They don’t always win, but that’s the expectation. At UW the expectation is to win enough games to get in a bowl game and beat up on teams like Wofford or the Citadel.
BB hasn’t dazzled me with many recruits. I don’t think anybody saw Monte Ball having the year he did. We knew he was a good UW type back, but nobody including BB saw 39 tds coming. He’s put his team in the hands of the likes of Aaron Henry who gets burned for 2-3 TD’s almost weekly. JJ Watt was a special player who the Badgers were fortunate to get on transfer. Russel Wilson was a special player who the Badgers were fortunate to get on transfer.
Borland and Taylor were great recruits, but show me one more top guy on that D, that the great defensive mind has recruited. Toon was practically a lock for UW since he has family tradition there. Abrederis is a walk on. Jim Leonhard was a walk on. Chris Marigold was a walk on.
He can recruit tight ends, well at least one. He’s carrying on a tradition of recruiting good offensive linemen, but please don’t tell me they come here because of him. They come to UW because of the tradition, and the amount of O lineman that make the NFL.
He hasn’t won big games throughout his career at UW. That’s the difference between him and Barry. Barry got his team to play up to competition. BB teams play down to competition.
Oregon is ranked number 5 in the country. I would disagree that they “played down” to their competition.
Both were 11-2 teams from mediocre conferences. I don’t think Oregon was head and shoulders above the badgers with the exception of losing to LSU. Loosing to LSU is clearly better than loosing to a down and out OSU team.
BB has at least one let down game every year. This year it was OSU. I can handle the MSU game, pretty even match (as we saw in both games). OSU was a team they played down to.
Last year it was MSU, most years it’s Iowa. I can think of very few wins that BB teams have pulled out where they were an underdog. OSU in 2010 comes to mind, and maybe just maybe when they beat Miami in the bowl game. When else have they played “up” over the last 6 years?
Not on Bucky’s wagon here, so take this for what it is worth…the decision to have them spike the ball on the last play was terrible. It was chancy at best. Surprised the QB wasn’t screaming out a play as they set the chains and ball after the first down, quick snapped, and at least heaved it in the end zone.
Marshall, Come in off the ledge.
Bielema does a lot of good for the UW, but unfortunately, that doesn’t include winning the big game. If you look at all the big losses over his tenure, each one contains a handful of WTF???? coaching decisions. Not sure if it is panic or what it is, but until he learns to handle the pressure of big games, the Badgers are likely to be a perennial 8 to 10 win team. I still believe he is a better than average coach, but he’s got plenty of room to improve.
The loss of Chryst will be a major blow to the offense.
John,
I’ve seen 6 years without any major improvement. He looks like a deer in the headlights whenever they’re in a close game. I didn’t say he was a bad coach, I said he’s a 7-10 win coach capable of winning a bowl game every three tries.
If that’s good enough for everybody then so be it. I just see no indication of him improving in any aspect to make me think that we’ll ever see more. I’m just of the mind set that coaches should be better than the last.
The whole Big 10 suffers when the “Best” in the conference loses in a manner that looks so foolish. Nobody in the country thought that spike was a good call. Coaching a major D1 college, he should know better than to call that timeout (especially after already wasting one).
Leaving yourself 1 timeout in the second half with 10 minutes left in the 3rd quarter is unacceptable. I went into watching this game hoping he proved me wrong and they won or lost strictly on talent. I can’t honestly say that was the case.
I’d be ok with the loss if this team was in the position to take that one shot down the field. If they didn’t get into the end zone, then so be it. Poor game management and poor play calling ruined their chances to take that shot, plain and simple.
He may not have lost them the game 100% on his own, but his ROOKIE mistakes didn’t help put them in a position to win either. If BB ever wins me over, it’ll be because he brings a decent defense back. This is what has made Ohio State what they are (with the exception of this year).
This is what made most of Barrys teams what they were (including BB’s 1st bowl win with all Barry players). I want a defense (especially from a defensive coach). The running backs, O-linemen, tight ends, and an occaisional stud reciever will be there. Alvarez won a Rose Bowl with Bollinger. Enough effort has been spent on the offense.
If you look at the matchups the big ten had. You will notice that just about all of them got to play a higher ranked team than they were. then when they take it on the chin everyone says the Big Ten sucks. You don’t see too many SEC teams coming up here to play us in the cold because they’d get broken off like a tent peg. Coach B has made some mistakes he did manage to talk Wilson up here or we would have likely had a losing record. Show me a perfect coach anywhere. I’d say the Badgers deserve a ranking of 6 as Oregon barely beat them in what was essentially a home game for them.
I wasn’t disagreeing with you, I just didn’t want you to jump. It’s not worth it.
The timeout and the call to spike the ball are perfect examples of the “WTF was that” type of decision Beilema makes in big games. Unless that changes, 8 to 10 wins at best per season.
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You don’t see too many SEC teams coming up here to play us in the cold because they’d get broken off like a tent peg.
They don’t come up here because they don’t make enough money doing it, the same reason the Badgers don’t travel there. There just isn’t any money in non-conference road games. In all the pre-season non-conference games I had to sit through as a season ticket holder, none of them were cold. It’s still pretty warm here in September.
They’re coming in 2017. We’ll see what happens then I guess. I just get so frustrated because I think BB gets way more credit than he deserves. I think that he’s still riding the coat-tails of the Alvarez era, and hasn’t really done anything special to move the program forward.
Special teams always has been and probably always will be an issue with his teams. Nothing has been done over 6 years to correct this. This is an issue to me.
Defense hasn’t gotten better, it’s gotten worse. A few pieces have fallen into place (see Wilson or Watt). Maybe he had something to do with those, but then again maybe not. Why aren’t we getting Russel Wilsons more often? Why aren’t we getting JJ Watt type players (I understand he was a special player and we can’t have one every year, but there has to be better D lineman and D Tackles than we have this year).
I call it like I see it. He’s kept a 7-5 to a 10-2 program going, nothing more nothing less. I guess we’ll see next year if this stud QB from California is the great recruit of his career. If so, I’ll ease up on the recruiting aspect (accept maybe on defense).
When it comes to recruiting, we get the same 3 to 4 star rated players that Michigan State, Penn St, Ill, and the rest of the Big Ten teams get.
We don’t get to many chances to sign the 5-start recruits like Ohio St, Alabama, LSU, Oklahoma, Oregon……and other perennial big time football schools regularly get to sign.
Why that is I’m not sure but trying to get over that hump and get inside that 5-star recruit circle is a monumental hurdle that many other colleges are trying to achieve.
Bret is clearly not there yet but he is close. He does need to win these big games in order to get there that much is for sure.
I don’t think we should dump Bret in the hopes that we land a better coach who will take us to that promised land. Not yet anyway.
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Nobody in the country thought that spike was a good call.
wimweum: To start I want none of this to be personal, I am defending BB because I think he has carried on Alveraz’s tradition including with his own players now. These teams have the potential to bring in better recruits… And while know he can be a pompous sort, he learned a lot of that from BA as well…
Question: I am not privy to who is calling the plays to Wilson, but during the spike (which horrified me as well) doesn’t Chryst figure in that as well or was that just a mistake made by Wilson???
Mark
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