Be honest: coming into this football season, how good did you think Wisconsin was going to be?
After a lackluster 2008 season that saw the team suffer six losses, including a blowout defeat to Florida State in the Champs Sports Bowl and a near loss to FCS opponent Cal Poly, the expectations for Wisconsin football in 2009 were understandably low. But with one game to go and the Big Ten schedule complete, it's hard to say the Badgers haven't surpassed what people thought they would do this year.
Despite their upset loss to Northwestern a week ago, Wisconsin found ways to win in a number of close games, something it couldn't do last year, and seems to have put the demons of 2008 to bed.
Granted, there have been persistent issues—the Badgers' pass defense, for instance, has been a problem since week one—the team has certainly seemed stronger this season than I or many other Badger fans predicted. Sure, they didn't step up the way fans might have hoped against Iowa and Ohio State, and their loss against Northwestern was unacceptable, but those kinds of games will happen.
If I thought the Badgers were a Rose Bowl team at the start of the year, this season would be a disappointment. But tell any Wisconsin fan their team would be heading into the last week of the regular season 8-3 back in August and they would think of that as a strong year.
Compare that to another Wisconsin sport, where fans came in with high expectations and have been let down so far: Badger women's hockey.
Yes, I realize very few people watch Wisconsin women's hockey despite its recent success, and yes I am a bit biased toward talking about the team because I cover them for this paper. But the team is a perfect opposite of Badger football this year: an example of how preseason expectations of glory can hurt a team.
Last season, Wisconsin women's hockey was nothing short of unstoppable, losing just two games on their way to a third national title in four years. This year, however, the team has looked anything but bulletproof, and despite a No. 7 national ranking, their 9-5-2 overall record raises questions about how the team could have fallen so far.
The reason for this disappointment is that many fans expected the same Badger hockey team that demolished almost every opponent last season to take the ice. But any time a team loses eight players, including four of its top five scorers, its goaltender and head coach Mark Johnson, to a combination of graduation and the U.S. Olympic Team, that team simply won't be as strong as it was.
So when Wisconsin started the season as cold as it did this year, it came as a shock to fans who expected them to bounce back from their offseason losses.
Badger football and women's hockey are two sides of the same coin. For one, fans expected a season that would live up to the misery of the previous one, while for another they assumed the team could mimic the success they had before.
It all boils down to a single mistake fans and analysts, myself included, tend to make in assessing a team before the season starts. Fans shouldn't only focus on what factors make a team the same from year to year in determining whether or not they will be successful, and instead look at what has changed.
Going into this year, football fans saw a quarterback controversy that was still unresolved and wondered how sophomore running back John Clay would adapt to his starting role, among other questions. But what many failed to see were the important differences in schedules between the two teams: this year, the Badgers didn't have to face Michigan or Fresno State on the road, and didn't play No. 10 Penn State at all.
Those questions about personnel lingered, but Wisconsin's schedule cleared an easier path for victories. I'm not sure this year's team is all that much better than it was a year ago, but the important differences in schedule make it seem that way, and certainly make fans happier.
For Badger women's hockey, important offseason changes have made them a weaker team than they were last year, but given their success in the 2008-'09 season many fans unreasonably expected the same results.
There is no offseason when it comes to fans thinking about ""next year,"" and at a time when so many outlets hype up a season, it can be easy for someone to make bold assertions that a team will fail or win, and that attitude festers in fans. From there, the results can be positive, such as this year's Wisconsin football team, or negative, as we have seen with Badger women's hockey.
Do you think fans put too much stock into preseason expectations? E-mail Nico at savidgewilki@dailycardinal.com.
