Times Have Changed in Wisconsin, Where the Football Team Is Finally Winning and Everybody Is Jumping on the . . . : Badger Bandwagon

Before Wisconsin was undefeated, before ESPN and ABC began courting the Badgers, before the school’s team was ranked 15th and mentioned in the same sentence with the Rose Bowl, there was an incident.

It happened several years ago. Wisconsin Coach Barry Alvarez was the guest speaker at a local Lumberman’s Assn. meeting when he overheard someone at a nearby table happily announce that he wasn’t going to renew his Badger football season tickets.

“I gave them up,” said the lumberman. “I want to see if they’re any good before I come back.”

Alvarez, 47, a former Nebraska linebacker who still looks as if he could pinch your head neck off, made a beeline for the table. Almost nose to nose with the stunned lumberman, Alvarez began a high-volume lecture series that ended with, “And I hope that when you do want to come back, that you can’t get season tickets!”

He probably can’t. Few can. For the first time in years, there isn’t an empty row in the 77,745-seat Camp Randall Stadium on game day. The “Bleacher Creatures” own the 14,000 seats in the student section, and the remainder of the 76-year-old stadium is filled with old-timers and newcomers alike.

Because of the attendance windfall, a $2.1-million athletic department deficit has been erased, to say nothing of the longtime perception that the Badger football program was Northwestern dressed in red. Granted, Wisconsin has had its moments, but not enough for anyone to refer to them as the good ol’ days.

Put it this way: The Badgers last won their opening six games the same year the Titanic sank and Jim Thorpe was stripped of his Olympic medals. That was in 1912. The jokes started shortly thereafter.

In its 104-year football history, Wisconsin has been to a grand total of three Rose Bowl games (none since 1963), the now-defunct Garden State Bowl, the 1982 Independence Bowl and the 1984 Hall of Fame Bowl. Alvarez recites the figures with disgust.

“Hey,” said Alvarez, who served as an assistant at victory-rich Iowa and then Notre Dame, “I’ve got a 14-year-old son and he’s been to 10 bowls in a row. There is no football tradition here.”

Alvarez is sort of right. When the Badgers defeated Purdue last Saturday, it ensured Wisconsin of its first winning record since 1984. Dave McClain was the coach then, but he died the next year and the Badger program seemed to die with him.

By the time Pat Richter, a former Wisconsin All-American football player who later played for Vince Lombardi with the Washington Redskins, was hired as athletic director in December of 1989, the place was a mess.

Richter needed a new coach. So he whittled his wish list to about eight finalists before deciding on Alvarez, then the Notre Dame defensive coordinator.

“I was looking for someone who was confident, aggressive,” Richter said. “In Barry’s case, this was his first shot. That’s a tremendous motivation for a young coach to be successful.”

Richter offered Alvarez the job shortly before Notre Dame played Colorado in the 1990 Orange Bowl. The Irish won, 21-6, and afterward Richter waited in his Miami hotel room for a call from Alvarez. As time passed, Richter began to get nervous. What if Notre Dame Coach Lou Holtz had grabbed Alvarez after the victory and asked him, “What the hell do I have to do to keep you here?”

It had happened before. In 1989, minutes after the Irish defeated West Virginia in the Fiesta Bowl for a national title, Holtz said those very words to Alvarez.

The phone finally rang in Richter’s room. It was Alvarez, who knew perfectly well that the Wisconsin athletic director had watched the entire Notre Dame game on television.

Said Alvarez of the Irish’s defensive effort: “How’s that?”

Richter had his man and Wisconsin had a new coach.

Things are wonderful now, but back in 1990, when Alvarez assembled his new team for its first meeting, the mood was decidedly grim. He had expected some turnover, but not 52 players to quit the squad by season’s end.

“Those cats were coming,” he said, gesturing toward his office door, “and saying, ‘Coach, I just don’t feel like I want to make that sort of commitment.’ Everyone said it. It was like they had a script, like someone had written it out for them.”

By the time the home season opener against California arrived, Alvarez had one running back on scholarship. His second-string fullback was a walk-on who later quit when he was promoted to first string. Too much pressure.

“Believe me, we started at rock bottom,” Alvarez said. “We had zero skill (players). I knew it was thin, but I could not perceive (the roster) being that devoid of talent.”

There were other surprises. Alvarez and his staff, almost all of whom had Rose Bowl or national championship experience, were accustomed to seeing packed stadiums and lively tailgate parties. As the team bus pulled up to Camp Randall for the game against the Golden Bears, Alvarez was amazed by the lack of fans.

“My eyes were this big,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. You could have shot a cannon off and not hit anybody.”

It was then that Alvarez turned to defensive coordinator Dan McCarney, the first person he had hired, and growled, “This is going to change.”

It did, but it took a while. The Badgers finished 1-10 in 1990, 5-6 the next season and were 4-2 midway through last season before they collapsed, settling for 5-6 and blowing a bowl bid in the process. Now comes the 6-0 start, and Richter said he expects several fledgling programs to make a run at the coach.

How all of this happened is no secret. For starters, Richter introduced the athletic department to the 20th Century. In the early days, things were so mired in bureaucracy that sports information director Steve Malchow used to buy his own office supplies rather than send a requisition form to the university’s black hole. Computers? They were scarcer than football victories.

Then he hired Alvarez, who steamed when he heard the inevitable Badger jokes at assorted booster functions. Once, he walked to the lectern and told an audience that he was sick of his team being the punch line.

“You may think it’s funny, but I’m the football coach and it’s not funny to me,” he said.

You could have heard the jaws drop.

Another time Alvarez was in the middle of a staff meeting when he noticed that almost all of his coaches were wearing championship or bowl rings from previous jobs. So Alvarez helped design a Wisconsin ring and later presented the lug nut-sized rings to each assistant.

“We were selling other schools,” said Alvarez, who retired his Notre Dame national title ring for his Wisconsin creation. “When you go out and recruit, the first thing they look at are the hands, the jewelry.”

Alvarez is big on recruiting. If you can’t recruit, you’re not on his staff. In fact, one of the reasons Richter said he hired Alvarez was because assistants McCarney and Bernie Wyatt, both accomplished recruiters, had promised to join the coach in Madison.

Getting McCarney and Wyatt to join Wisconsin wasn’t half as hard as attracting quality players.

Defensive tackle Carlos Fowler played on that 1-10 team as a true freshman. Those were the days when Badger teammates wore their lettermen jackets inside out, or worse yet, not at all.

“There was a sense of shame if you were on this football team,” Fowler said.

Cornerback Kenny Gales, a Queens, N.Y., native who redshirted last season, didn’t even know the university was located in Madison. For that matter, Gales said he thought the state of Minnesota was actually Wisconsin.

“A lot of other players I knew (in New York) would say, ‘Why are you going to Wisconsin?’ ” Gales said. “I was kind of biting my lip. But this is exactly what I wanted to be part of. Now I can go back and talk a lot of trash, a whole lot of trash.”

Gales might want to be careful. The last time the Badgers began looking ahead, they lost four of their last five games. Still on this season’s schedule is today’s game at Minnesota, home games against Michigan and Ohio State, a trip to Illinois and a game against Michigan State in Tokyo. A 10-1 record isn’t out of the question. Then again, neither is 6-5.

Wisconsin has outscored opponents, 209-97. Junior running back Brent Moss is second in the nation in rushing (821 yards) and sophomore Darrell Bevell is ranked third nationally in passing efficiency. The defense is also ranked in the top 25 in several key categories.

Alvarez never saw a second’s worth of film on Bevell before offering him a scholarship. Desperate for a quarterback, he took the word of offensive coordinator Brad Childress, who coached Bevell for one season at Northern Arizona. After that, Bevell, now 23, volunteered for a two-year Mormon mission and didn’t return to football until the spring of 1992.

As for Moss, he was leaning toward Michigan State when Alvarez and Moss’ mom persuaded him to stay close to home--he’s from nearby Racine--and sign with the Badgers. Don’t bother asking if he made the right choice.

“I think our football team has added some life to our campus,” he said.

Only recently, a Jefferson City, Mo., radio production company was awarded Wisconsin’s football and basketball broadcasts. It didn’t come cheap. Milwaukee-based WTMJ paid $340,000 for this year’s broadcast rights. Leerfield Communications will pay $450,000 next season, up to $475,000 in 1995 and about $500,000 in ’96. After that, Wisconsin can renew the option or start the bidding again.

And then there’s Madison native Kelly Meuer, part-owner of State Street Brats and a Wisconsin season-ticket holder. According to his calculations, business increases three-fold after a Badger victory.

But Meuer isn’t totally happy with Wisconsin’s success.

“It used to be real nice at the stadium,” he said. “You could sit in the upper deck, spread out and have lots of room. Now you have 16 inches of seat, that’s it.”

Imagine that--a spoiled Wisconsin fan.