This Week in Badgers: Northwestern, Minnesota, ILBs and Forgotten Games
Season 2, Episode 9
Welcome to This Week in Badgers, where we look forward to Minnesota (maybe?), backwards to a 2003 game no one remembers and talk Inside Linebackers.
Last Week: Northwestern. Thoughts are up here if you want to relive that one, I’m assuming you don’t.
Twitter Stuff
Jaypo isn’t wrong here, Coan definitely would have gotten some time against Northwestern and it would have been nice to get Mertz a break in the 2nd half to try and regroup, but also think he loved telling his audience to eat shit after being bombarded with Mertz tweets for a year and a half. Which is fair.
You figured there would be some Cruickshank remembrances after that one and you would be right. I’m sure he would have played for the Badgers on Saturday, I’m also sure he would not have made a difference.
It did make me curious what he’s been up to. So far this year he has 28 catches…for 197 yards. That’s a LOT of bubble screens.
I’m not trying to be a bitter Badger fan on this one, I truly wish him well at Rutgers and am glad he was an impact player for the Badgers on special teams last year, but he also is a very small Big Ten WR who is limited in what he can do!
A few notable DNPs or barely played (BPs?) through 3 games. Impossible to know what’s going on behind the scenes here and “missed practice time” could literally be anything. More so with COVID throwing another variable into the equation.
I know the focus from obsessives like us was on Abbott/Mustapha last week and obviously neither were able to contribute when the WR corp was depleted. Again, with no official word other than “missed practice” I think that ship has probably sailed with both of them but of course would love to be pleasantly surprised.
Easily the worst bold prediction on 2020. Ben, sorry but you have to delete your account.
I laughed
Next Week: MINNESOTA
There’s a good chance this game gets cancelled before you read this Newsletter.
Very quick preview in case they do play...
Their defense seems to be the biggest drop-off from last year. They come into this one giving up 215 rushing yards per game (12th in B1G) and 240 yards passing (7th). These stats include a layup against Illinois to help with the averages. Yikes.
I know their offense has been hit or miss this year but I’m betting it will be feisty this week and the first real test Wisconsin has had this year. Tanner Morgan hasn’t looked like the 2019 version but the talent is there. Rashod Bateman will be the best WR they see this year and will likely be without Rachad Wildgoose* to keep up with him. Mo Ibrahim is one of the better RBs in the B10.
The Badgers are currently 21 point favorites which is way higher than I would have guessed. It should hopefully be a relaxing Thanksgiving weekend game but the unknown injuries both teams are dealing with and weirdness of a rivalry game make me hesitate getting too comfortable. I’m most interested to see how Graham Mertz rebounds. He got punched in the mouth last week. Outwardly he seems like a confident guy, we’ll see how he handles some adversity this week.
*It feels weird that when the first depth chart came out that there was mild surprise Wildgoose was starting and 3 games later it seems like a controversial take to say he’s not the Badgers best CB? That happened really fast.
Recruiting
There’s no recruiting going on, it feels weird!
Pre-COVID I would roll my eyes at some of the recruiting updates but man if I wouldn’t absolutely kill for some tweets about how a guy was “wowed” and “really liked the atmosphere” during his official visit. Give me something!
Email from John:
Also, as stupid as it sounds, I got seriously nervous when Michigan came down and scored in the 3rd quarter. Even though the Badgers had completely dominated until then, their propensity to give up 2nd half leads against teams that can throw down field (see Big Ten Title Game: 2016, 2019) meant I wasn't comfortable until the 4th quarter. Which got me thinking:
Wisconsin is playing OSU. It's halfway through the 3rd quarter. How big a lead would Wisconsin need to for you to feel comfortable? I'd say 31. Anything less, and I'm just waiting for a critical special teams mistake and the eventual offensive avalanche to bury them.
It should be noted, I'm also a Vikings fan, so my psyche has been seriously scarred
I don’t think John is alone here, I was getting a LOT of panic texts from friends when the Badgers were up 25 points against Michigan late in the 3rd quarter.
I’ll attribute this to people being rusty with college football and out of the Badger groove. Badgers with a 25 point lead against team desperate enough to try their backup is prime “Look, it might get a little weird here and if that stresses you out, just turn the game off. But they’re going to win by at least two scores” territory.
But to answer the question? It would absolutely have to be 56 points or more against Ohio State for me to be comfortable. Probably more. It’d have to be a situation where I’ve worked out the math in my head where the Badgers could kneel the ball every time they had possession and still win.
Let’s Remember Some Games
Thought I’d mix it up this week and go with a game I went to and 100% didn’t remember at all. We have 20-ish games from the past 30 years that we remember deeply and like to talk about, but I wanted to look at just an average game from the past that wasn’t all that memorable. Its like finding a 20 year old photo of you and some friends you haven’t seen in ages at an event you completely forgot about. I threw a dart at the dartboard and it landed on the 2003 home game against North Carolina, a 38-27 Badger victory.
The 2003 Badgers were extremely loaded at the skill positions. Anthony Davis, Booker Stanley and Dwayne Smith were three legit options at RB. Lee Evans, Brandon Williams, Darren Charles and Owen Daniels were the top receiving options. Future Super Bowl winner Jim Sorgi was freed from the shackles of Brooks Bollinger and running the show at QB. God Damn.
They opened with a #21 ranking in the AP Poll, which was brief and lasted until one of the ugliest games in school history, a 23-5 disaster of a loss to UNLV. We won’t talk about that.
While the Anthony Davis injury against UNLV would be something that hamstrung them most of the year, the Badgers did get soft landing the following week when a bad North Carolina team that would end up going 2-10 came to town.
So of course North Carolina returned the opening kickoff 97 yards for a touchdown. I swear to God if you followed the team during this era it was the absolute least surprising thing ever. Whatever could go wrong with the Badgers absolutely did go wrong, especially if the special teams units were involved.
The defense was pretty good, if not great. They held UNC to under 300 yards and forced 3 turnovers, one of which recovered at the UNC 3 and set the Badgers up for an easy TD. Really the story was the Badgers not getting out of their own way on offense and special teams. Sorgi really struggled to start 2003 and this game was no exception. He threw an INT on first and goal from the UNC 6 yard line and another one from the UNC 43. Brutal.
Reading the postgame quotes you can just feel Alvarez seething and at some point during the game he reached the point where he said “fuck it, we’re going to run the ball if it kills us.” Despite a modest 4.2 yards per carry they did run the ball 50 times, with Booker Stanley and Dwayne Smith carrying the load.
Alvarez said after the game. “I’m not satisfied where we are at all. We’re going to have to do a lot of work this week.”
If you’re a player and you hear that, you know you’ll be running a lot in practice.
Sorgi wasn’t all bad, he did hit Lee Evans on a 3rd and 2 play action call that went for 44 yards and a TD to put the Badgers up for good.
The Badgers would go on a little bit of run after this game, beating abysmal Penn State and Illinois teams on the road and a very good Ohio State team in a home game we all remember, before collapsing the final 2 months of the season. Ah, memories.
2003 game against North Carolina, remembered.
Let’s talk ILBs
I love Rich, aka The Buck Around, for a couple of reasons. The main one is he gives me content ideas and indulges my Twitter DM rants that basically serve as rough drafts for the Newsletter. The second is that he isn’t afraid of the ratio that comes his way when he points out a potential problem with the team.
Shot
Chaser
I love looking at the roster construction of a college football team. NFL rosters are fairly boring. There are some variations but generally everyone has roughly the same amount of players at each position and there’s a enormous pool of free agents they can call upon when needed. People analyze the salary cap, they really do. Its a bore. College sports are obviously much different.
Out of the 85 scholarships there is a percentage of guys who are redshirting or not otherwise ready to play. 2-3 guys who are Ray Ball’d and not actually on the team. If a guy is lost to injury, they can’t put him on IR and sign someone else, they’re left with the roster they have. If a guy transfers in September, it may be 2 years until they can recruit and develop someone to take his place in the pipeline.
The Badgers (and most teams, save the Ohio States of the world) always have some areas where they’re loaded and other thin spots. Think about Badger rosters in the past decade, every position has had their turn at being the thin spot on the roster. This year it seems like ILB is taking a turn, so worth examining how they got there.
Going back to the 2016 class, which would be the 5th year seniors in 2020:
2016: Griffin Grady - medical
2016: Dallas Jeanty - transferred
2017: No ILB recruits
2018: Jack Sanborn - starter
2018: CJ Goetz - moved to OLB
2019: Maema Njongmeta - who knows?
2019: Leo Chenal- starter
2020: Malik Reed, Jordan Turner, Preston Zachman
2021: Bryan Sanborn, Jake Chaney, maybe Braelon Allen if he doesn’t play safety
Ideally the 2016-2018 classes would be responsible for the starters this year, and they only got 1 ILB contributor in 3 years of recruiting. Goetz was officially an ILB recruit but his position was very much up in the air when he signed so the switch to DE and then OLB was not surprising. They essentially signed just 3 ILBs in 3 classes, 2 of them weren’t contributors. That’s a big reason where we are at today.
Looking back at the coaching staff at the time it roughly corresponds to the lack of recruiting results there. Dave Aranda was the 2015 ILB coach responsible for the 2016 class, Justin Wilcox coached ILBs in 2016 and would have been responsible for the 2017 class, and we finally start to see numbers at the position in 2018 with a dedicated ILB coach in Bob Bostad.
Obviously recruiting is a team effort and not all on the position coaches to produce recruits for their positions, but it would make sense if the lack of a dedicated ILB coach hurt at least somewhat with numbers there. Wilcox especially wasn’t known as much of a recruiter during his very short time at Wisconsin. With Bostad they seemed to be aware of this and have thrown scholarship resources at it in 2020 and 2021.
There’s another part of this where its going to sound like a homer but I’ll do it anyways and ask: is there really a difference between walk-ons and scholarship players at ILB?
Obviously it’d be great if they had ILB stocked with 4 and 5 star guys but I feel like its one of the spots on the field (OL and FB are others) where I don’t automatically think the Badgers are hurting if they have a walk-on there. Yes, I understand the history of walk-ons at Wisconsin and they’ve put walk-ons to the NFL from every position on the field, but it feels like ILB is one spot where they’re best set up to succeed. Since they moved to the 3-4 they’ve had fantastic walk-on contributors in Cichy, Connelly and Trotter. While Chris Orr and TJ Edwards were scholarship recruits they were among the lower rated guys in their classes.
Its a spot where tons of players have size to play the position. ILB recruits are usually around 6’2” 220 lbs, and those body types are all over Wisconsin HS football. They’re not looking for a 6’5” 240 lb OLB or 6’6” 290 lb DT unicorn. Its a lot easier to find a few walk-ons to try out and see if anyone sticks.
In the 3-4 of course they want great athletes at ILB but don’t necessarily need to have combine stars to be great. TJ Edwards ran a 4.77 forty yard dash at the combine, for example. Its a position where you need to be quick, smart and decisive and being an insane person willing to run into a wall of blockers and shoot through gaps is often enough.
You notice it in the NFL as well. If you’re a Packer fan you’re very aware of their reluctance to spend resources at the spot (wait, maybe this doesn’t support my point). This article I cherry-picked to support my argument gets at it as well:
The easiest answer is that inside linebacker may be going the way of the running back. Sure, there are some running backs who will get paid, but most of the league sees the position as interchangeable. It’s almost a mirror reflection on the field. Use a big, pounding back on first and second downs, and sub in a speedy receiving back on third down and passing situations. Use a big, pounding linebacker on first and second down. Sub in a specialist on third and passing downs.
So yes, the ILB spot is pretty thin at the moment and losing Chenal or Sanborn would really hurt, but I’m not sweating Tatum Grass or any other walk-on being in the two deep at this spot. Plus they’ve got a lot of guys in the pipeline which will undoubtedly mean we have another thin position group next year.
I don’t know where else to put this but a thought that has entered my head lately is would Spencer Lytle be useful as an ILB in Nickel/Dime situations? He’s 6’2” 223 which is going to be tough to work at OLB, and doesn’t seem to have the build of a bruising ILB the Badgers are known for. I feel like working him into the ILB rotation and being someone who can patrol the short-middle and pressure the QB on 2nd/3rd down blitzes might be useful and also a way to get Chenal and Sanborn some breaks. Its super early in his career but at least some worry that he’ll end up being the tweener type that can’t find a home on defense has started to creep into my thoughts.
Anyways, enough on ILBs. We’ll tackle the second part of Rich’s Tweet - FB recruiting, in a 5 part series this off-season.
That’s it for this week, thanks for reading. Hopefully there’s a game this weekend? Happy Thanksgiving, Go Badgers
Thanks for bringing up the 2003 UNLV, you forgot to mention the crappy rainy weather. Other than Indiana 2001 and Cincinnati 1999 probably the worst game of the Alverez era. Oh, and it was my birthday...lol