Badgers Ball Ruminations: Nebraska Recap
Lol. Lmao. Things of that nature. Laughing to keep from crying, folks!
Pathetic. Embarrassing. Humiliating. Inadequate. Feeble. Lackluster. Doo-doo assed.
These are just some of the words that would describe the Wisconsin Badgers’ “effort” on Saturday afternoon against the Nebraska Cornhuskers. Losers of 10 straight to Wisconsin and nine straight with bowl eligibility on the line, Nebraska came out of the gates hot and took advantage of myriad UW mistakes to blow the doors off the Badgers, 44-25. That’s the most points Nebraska has scored this season and the most points they’ve ever scored against Wisconsin.
Luke Fickell’s team, fresh off the firing of offensive coordinator Phil Longo, showed limited signs of life on that side of the ball but completely pissed down their leg on defense as the Huskers racked up 473 yards of offense and the aforementioned 44 points. It’s a little known fact, but, legally speaking, Wisconsin’s offense and defense can’t play well at the same time. The Badgers are just following law enforcement instructions.
Fickell has been constantly preaching how close this team is to getting over the hump or breaking through or whatever bullshit he has been spewing after disappointing losses the past two seasons, which begs the question…is he stupid, blind, a liar, or all three? Nothing about how Wisconsin has played this season gives off “almost a top-tier B1G team” vibes. Hell, it doesn’t even give off “top-half of the B1G team” vibes.
This team is bad. The quarterback is bad. The coaching is bad. They aren’t tough enough. They don’t play with enough (any?) heart. The team makes boneheaded decisions that result in crucial penalties almost every week. I know they don’t get penalized that often, but so many of them have been back-breaking infractions that it’s hard to say anything other than “this team is not properly prepared to meet the moment.”
Firing Longo was the correct call, but there are many, many other things that need to change in Madison before this program is even close to winning eight games, let alone any sort of championship that isn’t the Boca Raton Bowl. To be quite honest, I don’t know if Fickell is a good enough coach to make the requisite on-field decisions to get the Badgers back on track.
He’s clearly a talented and persuasive recruiter, and having a higher talent floor on the team should certainly help, but he doesn’t appear to have anything resembling a plan or a vision for the team outside of his fucking stupid T.E.A.M. jacket that I’d like to burn. There is zero consistency in the gameday decision making, whether it’s fourth down decisions or two-point conversion decisions or when to kneel out the half instead of trying to run a play for some reason that wasn’t even a pass and even if it hadn’t been a fumble and Wisconsin got into field goal range would their shit-ass kicker even be able to kick it towards the uprights?
I will always, unfortunately, care about this stupid fucking team no matter how much I say I won’t but Fickell is teetering on the edge of having a lot of fans tune out. They haven’t beaten anyone better than them in his tenure and they regularly don’t beat teams on their same level. They have lost their first two trophy games of the season and their final trophy game, at home against archival Minnesota in a game they need to win in order to be bowl eligible, is one in which they won’t be favored. When/if they lose it’ll be their fifth straight loss to end the season.
There is zero percent of me that believes Wisconsin will beat Minnesota on Friday and that seems like as good an indicator as any to where the UW program sits.
Good Things
You, me, basically everyone has been hard on QB Braedyn Locke’s performance this season but he showed up and played pretty damn well in his first game without Longo calling the plays. Locke was 20-of-30 for 292 yards, three TDs, and his weekly interception. Although, to be fair, his pick occurred when the game was already decided AND it ricocheted off WR Bryson Green’s hands.
He wasn’t perfect, but he played well enough to be the winning quarterback on Saturday and there haven’t been many games recently where you could say that.Green, while he should’ve caught the ball that was intercepted, had a nice game otherwise. He caught four passes for 52 and a pair of scores, both of which were impressive catches where he went up and over Nebraska defensive backs to secure the touchdown.
Green missed a month earlier this season with an injury so it’s nice to see him back on the field and performing up to his potential. The big-bodied receiver can be a lethal red-zone threat when healthy.
WR Vinny Anthony continued his breakout season with the best game of his career. Against Nebraska he caught seven passes for 137 yards (19.6 ypc) and a 58-yard TD that pulled Wisconsin within 12 near the beginning of the fourth quarter. It was his third 50-yard TD of the season and his sixth catch of over 40 yards.
Freshman RB Darrion Dupree looked explosive running the ball for 63 yards on eight totes.
I liked how WR Trech Kekahuna cut the ball up field on the little pop pass play UW ran when he saw that he’d be stopped if he kept going towards the sideline.
P Atticus Bertrams punted well.
The forced fumble by ILB Jake Chaney and soft hands on the recovery by DL Ben Barten were nice.
If you look at the advanced stats for this game, Wisconsin’s offense actually played really well. They had a 52% success rate (92nd percentile on the season) and averaged 0.19 EPA/Play (79th) while picking up 7.7 yards per play (89th). The running game was lackluster (-0.21 EPA/rush; 16th percentile) but Locke had an EPA/dropback of 0.51 which is in the 91st percentile for the season in all of FBS.
Hell, they even had an explosive play rate in the 90th percentile with four coming through the air and three on the ground. In every one of those stats (except rushing EPA) they were better than Nebraska in this game. Again, these are offensive numbers that, if offered, Fickell and co. would’ve jumped at before the game was even kicked off because more often than not you’d imagine Wisconsin winning by multiple scores if Locke played like that.
Bad Things
Unfortunately, there are multiple units on a football team, not just one and for as good as the offense was, the defense and field goal kicking were worse. The offense, as they have all season, struggled again in pivotal situations. UW was 3-of-10 on third down and 1-of-2 on fourth down while also only scoring one touchdown in three trips to the red-zone.
Down by 17 with 6:27 to go in the third quarter Wisconsin had the ball on Nebraska’s 25-yard line and faced 4th and 2…can you guess what happened? They tried to pound the ball up the middle with RB Tawee Walker and, SHOCKINGLY, Nebraska sold out to stop the run up the middle and dropped Walker for a loss of one. In another sign of a well-coached and creative team, the Badgers had the ball in the red-zone after a big forced turnover and couldn’t get in the endzone but had a 29-yard FG set up for K Nathaniel Vakos…except they got called for a delay of game and Vakos, who made the kick, had to try again from 34 yards which he proceeded to shank.Which brings me to my next point…penalties. The Badgers had seven of them on Saturday and I’d say that six of them were brutal self-owns that contributed directly to Wisconsin losing. Let’s go over them in painstaking detail!
the delay of game that led to a missed FG mentioned above
a false start by Joe Huber that moved the Badgers from 1st and 10 at the Nebraska 23 to 1st and 15 at the Nebraska 28 doesn’t seem like that big of a deal until you realize that UW ended that drive with a field goal (this one went in!) on a 4th and 3…which would’ve been a 1st and 10 on the Nebraska 13 if UW hadn’t lost five yards earlier
with Nebraska up 14-10 and in Wisconsin’s redzone with 26 seconds left, the Huskers faced 3rd and 10. CB Ricardo Hallman committed a blatant pass interference penalty to give the Huskers 1st and goal from the 5-yard line and they scored on the next play to go up 21-10
OL Joe Brunner had a false start at the beginning of the third quarter that didn’t really affect much
and now for the fucking coup de grâce to this painstakingly pitiful performance! The Badgers had just scored a TD and converted a two-point conversion to cut Nebraska’s lead to 12 with 8:30 remaining. Was a comeback likely? Ehhh, probably not, but if the UW defense got a quick three-and-out? Well, now Nebraska will start thinking about all of the other games they’ve blown over the past five years in situations exactly like this and…you never know what could happen! Instead of anything close to that, Nebraska methodically marched down the field, aided by three (!!!) Wisconsin personal foul penalties, and scored the final touchdown-shaped nail in the Badgers’ coffin. LB Tackett Curtis, who is basically a walking personal foul at this point, committed two of them and John Pius whacked Nebraska QB Dylan Raiola in the face for the other one. All three were avoidable and yet!
The penalties appear to be getting worse as the season goes on and that is, quite literally, the sign of a poorly coached and developed team! What the hell do they teach in practice?
Mike Tressel’s defense, a week after looking really good against Oregon, was out-schemed and out-muscled all game by the Huskers. The Badgers recorded zero sacks, zero tackles for loss, and probably couldn’t even tell you what number Raiola was wearing because they never got close enough to him to see. It was a mind-bogglingly poor performance against a freshman quarterback who has shown that he suffers when pressured. Missing star S Hunter Wohler for the whole game and LB Jake Chaney for some of it surely affected the defense, but so much that a putrid Nebraska offense suddenly looked like The Greatest Show on Turf?
Vakos missed, quite badly, two makeable kicks. He has had a, to put it politely, difficult season.
Is there anyone on Fickell’s staff that can do math? How do they make their two-point conversion decisions? Do they have a chart? Is it completely vibes-based? It seems like it is and it seems like Fickell has zero fingers on the pulse of those vibes!
The tackling was bad by Wisconsin.
The Badgers, as noted by JJ Watt during the game, have been the less physical team in the trenches against both Iowa and Nebraska. One can expect that to continue (unless the Badgers magically fix everything about their team on a short week lmao) against Minnesota on Friday.
Nebraska entered the game on a four-game losing streak. They hadn’t beaten Wisconsin in 10 games and were 1-11 against UW since joining the Big Ten in 2011. They had never won the Freedom Trophy. They were 0-9 in their last nine games when trying to win their sixth game of the season. They hadn’t been bowl eligible since 2016, their longest bowl drought since 1961.
All they needed to cure what ailed them was a visit from Luke Fickell’s Badgers. Teams now see UW on the schedule and can safely assume they’ll see a soft, mentally-weak, poorly-coached squad that will assuredly shoot themselves in the foot at least once.
As I was finishing writing this, 2025 4-star QB Carter Smith (Fort Myers, Fla.) announced that he was officially flipping his commitment from Michigan to Wisconsin. Smith is the second-highest rated QB (after Graham Mertz) the Badgers have had in the recruiting rankings era. By all accounts he is the type of guy that can come in and make an instant impact.
Recruiter Fickell is giving Coach Fickell a ton of arrows in his quiver. Hopefully Coach Fickell can point them in the right direction. Right now? I would watch my own feet if I were on Wisconsin’s sideline.
Embarrassing. I turned off tv at end of 1st quarter, listed to Lepay for 10 more minutes in 3rd quarter, and decided to clean my aquarium instead shortly thereafter. W T H.
What's the plan now, Coach? 😬