With Wisconsin football and basketball schedules at hand, it's fairly easy - think Duke offense slicing through Badger defense kind of easy - to say this will be one of the more forgettable sports weekends in Madison.
No happenings in the Wisconsin basketball arena, other than a reality check and recovery after the Cameron Comedown. Badger football can see to it that tickets are booked for a date in Tampa, and the NFL's most anticipated game was indeed played last night, whether you saw it, or more than likely, did not.
Really, the only possibility that will make these next two days pleasantly relevant is a sweep of St. Cloud State. More than that, it's how the Badger men's hockey team plays overall that will give a clearer picture as to the direction of its season.
Twenty-four point loss or not, Bo Ryan's Badgers are not the team struggling most on this campus right now, although it may seem like it. You can not allow nine three-pointers and shoot 30 percent in the first half on the road and come close to winning, as Wisconsin showed earlier this week.
The Badger hockey team is the group that's in danger, not the other principle team that plays at the Kohl Center. It's four losses in the last five games, if you're counting. If you're not, take notice, because the two games this weekend will either represent a badly needed turnaround or a slide into even greater depths of the Western Collegiate Hockey Association.
The Badgers have played 12 games so far this season and are six games into conference play. Three weeks ago, this was a team that had won a couple in a row and had a chance to sweep powerful North Dakota out of Madison. Since then, it's been four straight losses and a tie.
This funk has put the Badgers into a freefall, all the way down to eighth place in the WCHA. It's unfamiliar territory down there for UW, being flanked by Alaska-Anchorage and Minnesota State.
This next series against St. Cloud State is without a doubt gut-check time for the Badgers. Either the slide continues or UW gains some sort of footing and stabilizes itself before one more series at Minnesota St.
More than any other team on campus, it's men's hockey that is the most enigmatic. There is enough talent on the roster to compete with any team in the country, but the inexperience and youth is always a possible liability. Like a reasonable person would expect, they are the type of team that is streaky, and the numbers clearly bear that out.
Two games against St. Cloud State should give an idea of where the Badgers stack up.
First, they are playing at home and should be jacked up to redeem themselves after a rough road trip. Second, St. Cloud is no pushover, ranked No. 10 and playing sound on both ends of the rink. Third, it's not often that Wisconsin struggles against the Huskies. UW hasn't lost to them in any of the past 11 games.
All of that makes for an interesting storyline heading into a Badger sports weekend that, at the moment, has few of them.
If you think this weekend is as important to the men's hockey team as Jon does, feel free to
e-mail him at bortin@wisc.edu.
