Column: 3 B1G predictions for the 2023 football season
It’s time to get back to football.
Use the fields below to perform an advanced search of The Daily Cardinal's archives. This will return articles, images, and multimedia relevant to your query. You can also try a Basic search
828 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
It’s time to get back to football.
I often hear that the best sporting atmosphere in the world is an English Premier League game. Just as often as I hear that, though, I feel it necessary to dispute it. The best sporting atmosphere in the world, I will let any European kind enough to lend me an ear know, is a college sports game. The most electric games I’ve been to in my just over 19 years of life have been college volleyball and softball games. The dedication and passion Americans feel towards their schools creates an inimitable energy that is palpable every time you step into a stadium.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has plenty to brag about. From its consistent academic prestige to its beautiful lakeshore campus and buzzing social scene, UW-Madison is considered by many a top university in the nation. However, another attribute that garners national respect is Wisconsin’s long and storied athletic programs — specifically in football and men’s basketball.
In college sports, schools in America tend to have a reputation based on what they are typically successful in. Alabama and Oklahoma tend to be known as “football schools,” while Duke and Kansas are referred to as “basketball schools.”
Dominick Mersch stared down at the concrete floor of the Kohl Center as a sea of media personnel engulfed him. On Saturday, the fifth-year captain played his last game for the Badgers — a 7-4 loss to the No. 4 Michigan Wolverines in the Big Ten Tournament Quarterfinals. Two days later, he learned his longtime coach would be leaving the university with him.
Another disappointing season has come to an end for the Wisconsin men’s hockey team. This year’s team finished dead last in the Big Ten with a dismal record of 13-23-0. Making matters worse, preseason rankings projected the Badgers to finish fourth in the conference. Furthermore, of the seven hockey teams in the Big Ten, five are ranked in the top 20 nationally with a sixth, Notre Dame, receiving 41 votes, essentially ranking 21st.
As a great year of Wisconsin sports wraps up, fans, players and athletic staffers look ahead to the next.
In the world of sports, one of the most fiercely debated topics does not include a single team or player. Rather, it’s about how these players achieve the magnificent athletic feats they so often do, like smashing towering home runs or flying down the lane for a windmill slam. These athletes use certain substances to give them the athletic edges needed to produce highlights, but there is a growing debate over how much of an advantage is too much.
Is sports betting legal in Wisconsin yet? I’m looking to place an out of state tuition-sized bet that Jim Leonhard will be hired as the Badgers’ permanent coach.
Hierarchical models of power are inescapable, no matter where we look in our society today. This is no different in sports. Unfortunately, many sport hierarchies do not give much, if any, power to those other than the highest entities.
From the top of the student section, all I could think was, “Not again.”
Once the first week of football is over, it’s easy to jump to conclusions. Every team is either overrated or underrated. We adjust our opinions — and emotions — based on such little evidence.
In case you missed it, the Big Ten grew. On June 30, the Big Ten announced USC and UCLA would join the conference in 2024.
Last month, the Cleveland Indians voted to remove their Chief Wahoo imagery from their uniforms effective next year. Cleveland’s Chief Wahoo and other Native American mascots have been the source of years of controversy due to their inaccurate depiction of indigenous peoples. And while the removal of Chief Wahoo is a step in the right direction for Cleveland, it barely scratches the surface of eradicating cultural appropriation in sports.
With the fallout of the Larry Nassar scandal affecting Michigan State, schools in the Big Ten Conference and NCAA in general, schools all over the country are now being held under increased scrutiny in terms of how they choose to respond to misconduct scandals involving their coaches.
Why care about sports?
The recent history of Wisconsin sports can be easily summed up in a few numbers. Simply uttering the phrases “408” or “38-1” is enough to elicit visceral responses from Badgers fans anywhere. Yet there is one numerical phrase equally seared into the memory of (as ESPN announcer Rod Gilmore repeatedly calls them) Bucky Badger fans. The ignominy of it still reverberates through the annals: 59-0.
My middle school soccer team was good. Like, really good.
As far as I’m aware, there are no T-shirts with Paul Chryst’s face on them. While I personally think they’d be a hit, they sadly don’t seem to exist. Yet as my Instagram feed reminds me almost weekly, such shirts do exist for Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh — plain white T-shirts adorned with his face stretched out to be three feet tall (note: his mouth is only slightly bigger on the shirt than in real life). And that’s pretty much all you need to know about those two coaches.
This year ESPN released a list called “Ranking the happiness of every college football fan base.” The survey took into account program power, rivalry dominance, coaching stability, recruiting trend, revenue growth and Twitter buzz. The results were in many ways unsurprising. Wisconsin came in at 14th out of 128 FBS programs. Predictably, its strong suits according to the survey were program power (95/100), revenue growth (98/100) and rivalry dominance (99/100). It’s hard to argue with those numbers.