This Week in Badgers: Alvis Has Entered the Building and Spring Practice is Here!
This Week in Badgers: Season 1, Episode 33
Welcome to This Week in Badgers where meet the new WR Coach, unveil a Spring Practice wish list and analyze the Combine. Yes you read that correctly, the Combine.
Housekeeping
News:
Apologies to all the Brian White fans out there (ie, me), but the Badgers welcomed Alvis Whitted as WR coach on Wednesday. Whitted seems like a great hire on paper, but of course who the hell knows.
Eight years in the NFL as a player should certainly help with recruiting and he had success at Colorado St. Only lasted one year with the Packers, but hard to read into that too much. Bostad , Settle and I'd guess 95% of NFL assistants get fired at one point in the career.
Judging assistant coach hires is impossible. Hiring a guy who flamed out at his previous job might work out fine and hiring a guy with the “perfect” resume might fail. Justin Wilcox got canned at USC and was great at UW. Ted Gilmore had been fired at Nebraska, not retained after 3 rough years in the NFL and was a great hire at Wisconsin. Mike Markuson spent 10 years in the SEC before taking the OL job at Wisconsin and he was probably the worst assistant coach hire in school history.
Spring Practice starts March 10th! Hallelujah!
Links
I won’t fake my way through a recruiting update and instead link B5Q who had a good Junior Day rundown. Jake at AllBadgers also had a good update. The Badgers offered a guy named Markus Allen. Hell yeah.
Jesse Temple with the top 20 underclassmen to watch this spring, he’s got the RBs high up on the list. No disagreement there.
Jaypo with a look at the LB rotation
John Settle tweeted!
Most of the Official Badger Social stuff was combine related. Yawn.
Todd Milewski had a breakdown of attendance last year. The Michigan game was the highest attended game since Nebraska in 2016 and only 51,286 showed up for Kent State.
Last year was a weird year with 5 straight home games at the beginning of the year. It makes a lot of sense that many took off the Kent State game, which was right in the middle of that stretch.
Let’s make this podcast happen
Jake at AllBadgers notes 9 of 15 Badger practices will be open to the media.
No spring game of course, but they did come out with details on some activities and an open practice on April 18th.
This actually sounds pretty cool, so kudos for them for putting something together. Two years ago they cancelled the spring game a week in advance due to “weather,” and last year they announced no spring game to some criticism, before rolling out what seemed to be a half-assed open practice thing. This is much more thought out and sounds pretty awesome. If you have kids you get to let them run around the field and see all the trophies. If you don’t, there’s a 2 hour practice to obsess over.
Opening up the facilities like this seems like a no-brainer and something they could do a couple times in the off-season if they wanted to.
Let’s Remember Some Guys
This week’s guy is Tyler Donovan, QB from 2004-2007. Donovan spent his Redshirt year learning from Jim Sorgi, was a backup to John Stocco the next 3 years, and finally got his shot as a starter in 2007.
2007 was an interesting year. The OL wasn’t a strength and Donovan was under pressure a lot, taking a ton of sacks and scrambling quite a bit. The running game was also inconsistent with Freshman PJ Hill, Zach Brown and Lance Smith, who was on probation and could only play home games. I can’t believe that happened.
The WR depth wasn’t great and was really hurt when Luke Swan broke his leg against Illinois in October. Travis Beckum was amazing, but really the only top receiving option.
All that said, Donovan was pretty good! He holds the school record for total plays in a season (rushing and passing) with 445, 7th in passing yards with 2,607 and his 392 passing yards against Illinois is 3rd all time for a single game. It would sure have been nice to have him in 2008.
He also had a cameo in the movie Draft Day, because why not.
Tyler Donovan, remembered.
Spring Wish List
I should know better by now, but with 3 months off between the bowl game and Spring Practice I always get my hopes up that there will be some groundbreaking news. Some player we weren’t counting on becomes a force and disrupts the depth chart. Media will see some new offensive wrinkles that will get everyone excited.
That of course never happens. We get news about walk-on RBs we know we’ll never see and get reports about every QB looking good in 7 on 7 drills. But we can dream!
My wish list for spring practice is below, by position group.
QB: Give me the Graham Mertz hype! I realize nothing will change on the depth chart, nor should it, but I want media reports that Mertz is slinging it against no defense. Please.
RB: Isaac Guerendo in the rotation. We know they like his speed but he hasn’t taken a carry out of the backfield in his two years. Is he going to be in the RB rotation or more of a Aron Cruickshank gadget play, special teams guy? Julius Davis just practicing would be notable as well. He missed a lot of time in HS with injuries as well as most of last year, so just seeing him in the practice reports would be #noteworthy.
WR: Scholarship backup(s) stepping up. Mustapha, Abbott, Green, Perry, Bracey have a chance to make an impression with the new WR coach and break into the two deep. No offense to Dunn or Krumholz, but it would be nice if one of the above guys is talked about as a 3rd receiver next to Davis and Pryor.
OL/DL: No injuries? Its hard to take anything from spring for these positions. OL will try guys out in spots they won’t play in the fall and, everyone gets a crack at playing time. I guess I’m interested to see if they work Benton in at DE at all, but don’t know that would necessarily even happen in Spring.
LB: This Newsletter is officially driving the Jaylan Franklin hype-train, let’s see him talked about as a starter. I’m most interested in seeing the Spring roster here. Possible position changes with Njongmeta and seeing what weights IGM, Franklin and Lytle are at is almost more interesting to me than the practice reports.
DB: Struggling to find something I would get excited about here. We know the names and we know they’ll have some sort of rotation. I guess guys we didn’t see anything out of last year like Blaylock and Engram in the mix would be somewhat interesting.
K/P: Who is the damn punter! Who is holding for extra points now that Connor Allen is gone? Give me this info!
Combine Talk
As noted in the space before, I don’t have the energy to care about Badgers once they leave Wisconsin. I especially get burnt out on the MONTHS of NFL draft talk on Twitter and TV. That said, I do like comparing former Badgers to other former Badgers and the combine does gives us the data to do that.
I’ve got a full Doc with all the Badger combine performances here if you’re interested in going deeper.
Some takeaways:
Chris Chambers is the Badger Combine Legend:
Here are his results and rank among all Badgers all time
40 Yard Dash: 4.33 (1st)
Vertical: 45” (1st)
Broad Jump: 134” (1st)
Shuttle 4 (5th)
Aaron Gibson really was that big
Showed up a 6’5” 386 lbs, almost 50 pounds heavier than the next closest guy (Josh Oglesby). He put up 31 reps on the bench and ran a 5.35 40 yard dash, beating 14 other Badgers. DAMN.
Jim Leonhard, coasting off viral video fame
Leonhard very famously dunked once, and this story/video was played during every single game of his Badger career. He went to the combine and ran the 40, but didn’t participate in the vertical jump. I have a suspicion he knew he couldn’t top the viral dunk video and didn’t want to put up a disappointing number. A media member needs to ask him about this.
Joel Stave’s 40 time
The Alex Hornibrook era made us forget how immobile Stave was at QB. He was a statue. Stave ripping off a 4.8 in the 40 rivals beating Ohio State in 1985 as the biggest Badger upset of all time.
Kickers Who Bench
I don’t see the point of having kickers at the combine. Kicking or Punting in shorts and a t-shirt, in a dome, with no defense, is probably more misleading than helpful. Sure getting accurate heights/weights/medicals are important but even then, 95% of these guys are going to at best be late round picks. Truly, who cares.
But I do love that they have the option to bench press, something you would only do if you wanted to show off. Taylor Mehlhaff and Todd Gregoire both showed up to accomplish this and did, with Mehlhaff putting up 13 reps and Gregorie 12.
Mehlhaff not only bested 8 combine Badger players, he was only 1 away from topping Troy Fumagalli and 2 away from Rob Havenstein, a current starting OL in the NFL.
Drafting guys based on 40 times might not be great
Chris Chambers had a solid NFL career but can’t say the same for the other top 40 times.
Tony Simmons parlayed his 4.35 time into a 2nd round pick. He was able to stick in the league for a few years but mostly in a backup/special teams capacity
BJ Tucker was a lightning rod for criticism at Wisconsin and was taken in the 6th round after running a 4.38 and didn’t make it through his first training camp
Natrell Jamerson put up a 4.4 and didn’t make it out of his first camp after getting picked in the 5t round
Dez Southward didn’t participate in the combine but did run a 4.31 on Pro Day and got drafted in the 3rd round, but only lasted just over a year
Not bringing this up to slam these guys, the NFL is hard as hell, especially for late round picks. Its just lesson #5,353 that the combine isn’t everything.
Fastest Badgers by Position
QB: Russell Wilson, 4.53
RB: Jonathan Taylor, 4.39
WR: Chris Chambers, 4.33
TE: Travis Beckum, 4.62
OL: Joe Thomas, 4.94
DL: Tom Burke, 4.84
LB: Leon Jacobs, 4.48
DB: BJ Tucker, 4.38
WHEW, that’s a lot of combine and NFL talk. I swear it will never happen again. Thanks again for reading, Go Badgers.