Just saw the news about Ballard and Finley on that AD search committee and it got me thinking about something that has been eating at me for years now. We have lost our identity. I watched the 1993 Rose Bowl team and I watched the 2011 Rose Bowl team and I watched every single squad in between and they all had one thing in common. They hit you in the mouth. They ran the ball down your throat until you quit. That is Wisconsin football. That is what Barry Alvarez built with his bare hands in the frozen Madison winters when nobody believed a program from the north could compete with the big boys.
Now I look at what we have become and I do not recognize us. We are out there trying to spread the field and throw it 40 times a game like we are some Big 12 outfit. We have offensive linemen who do not know what a down block looks like because they are too busy pass setting on every snap. We have running backs who dance around in the backfield looking for a cutback lane instead of putting their helmet on somebody and falling forward for four yards. That is not Wisconsin football. That is a program that forgot who it was.
You want to know what toughness looks like? I will tell you. It is Ron Dayne running over Michigan defenders in the rain in 1999. It is Joe Thomas pancaking defensive ends on the way to 300 yards rushing. It is J.J. Watt chasing down a screen pass from the backside because he refused to quit on a play. It is John Clay dragging four defenders into the end zone against Ohio State in 2010. That is what we did. We did not finesse anybody. We lined up and said here it comes and you could not stop it.
I see teams like Oklahoma State bringing in 50 transfers and Colorado grabbing 43 new faces and I just shake my head. That is not building a program. That is renting a roster. We used to develop players. We used to take a three-star kid from Wisconsin who had something to prove and we turned him into an All-American by his senior year. That is how you build toughness. That is how you build a culture that lasts longer than one season.
The portal killed that. NIL killed that. Kids do not want to grind anymore. They do not want to sit behind a senior for two years and learn the system and earn their spot. They want to transfer to the first school that promises them playing time and a bag of cash. And we are doing it too now. We are chasing quarterbacks in the portal and trying to install offenses that do not fit our personnel. It makes me sick.
Ballard and Finley understand what made this program great. They were part of it. Ballard scouted those Wisconsin offensive linemen who went on to dominate the NFL. Finley played on those Badger basketball teams that fought for everything they got. They know toughness. They know grit. They know that you do not build a program by chasing the latest trend. You build it by establishing a standard and holding everybody to it.
I hope whoever they hire as our next AD has the guts to bring us back to who we a...