Last Saturday following his team's upset victory over Texas Tech and Oklahoma State, coach Mike Gundy decided that the best way he could celebrate his team's victory would be to go postal on a local columnist named Jenni Carlson. The tirade included just about every insult short of Gundy calling Carlson a "meanie" and giving her a public atomic wedgie.

You see, Carlson had openly questioned and mocked the Cowboys former starting quarterback for what she believed to be a lack of toughness. The resulting atomic meltdown by Gundy left bothYouTube legends, along with Bobby Knight and the trampoline bear.

When I realized how much press you can get just for calling an athlete's toughness into question, I wondered why I hadn't thought of doing something like it before.

So here I am to openly question the toughness of Wisconsin bulldozer P.J. Hill, which simply is appalling.

First off, here's a guy that UW coach Bret Bielema said needed some "toughen up" pills last year. Apparently Bielema fed them to Hill by the shovel-full, to a level that not only isn't natural, it can't be legal.

Since Hill first arrived on the NCAA scene, he has been dealing punishment to defenders throughout the Big Ten like beads on Bourbon Street, with a running style that could probably best be described as "total annihilation of the opponent." Stepping through, over and mostly on helpless (and hapless) Wildcats, Gophers and Hoosiers, Hill has shown no mercy for the poor schmucks.

Those players he steamrolled have mothers. They're children of mothers, and he didn't care. When they ganged up 11 to one to tackle him, he barreled right through them anyway.

That is just baloney. Total malarkey. And the coach that let him do it is fulla baloney, fulla malarkey too!

I once saw P.J. standing around the team bus after a particularly vicious mauling of some children of mothers at Indiana. Standing near Hill outside the bus, an ex-con was feeding Hill a bowl of nails and rusty bolts and sprockets. That kind of toughness just can't be allowed.

He went on to play in a bowl game against Arkansas, and with a bummed shoulder, he still plowed into the Razorbacks 12 times to gain about 0 yards, just to give them a little bit of hope before taking the rock seven times in the final 3:55 to seal the game. Bad Newz Kennelz was more humane.

But it wasn't enough. Now Hill has gone and lost 20 pounds during the offseason, telling everyone that he wasn't going to seek contact all the time. The entire Big Ten (along with Washington State and UNLV) took a collective sigh of relief.

Come game time, however, they saw it was just a rouse, as Hill wasn't just still a rumbling block of TNT, but that carrying less weight, he could actually run harder in the fourth quarter. Harder! More punishment!

The only kind person that would continually trek dirt and field turf rubber granules all over the jerseys and spirit of children — kids who are just trying to do what is right and tackle the man with the ball — obviously has never had a child. Because if he had, if he knew what it was like to look his child in the eye and hear, "P.J. Hill just lost 20 pounds and still posterized me like I was Greg Ostertag," he wouldn't do what he does.

I would like to note that 75 percent of this is fiction.

What isn't however is, a) P.J. Hill, however slimmed down is still a force, and for all the talk about the defense, new quarterback and other fabulously talented ball-callers, he is still the Badgers ticket to a Rose Bowl.

And, b) Mike Gundy didn't just overreact, or make a fool of himself, or take away from his team's victory, or open himself up to endless criticism, or make himself a prime candidate for media target of the year, but he did all of the above.

What Carlson wrote wouldn't be something I would write, but as long as the facts are reasonably solid (and there's no reason to think that they aren't), she had a right to put it in print.

Even if it was a stupid opinion.

Dave McGrath is a former sports editor and current Packers beat writer for the Shawano Leader. He would like to point out that Brett Favre himself said that he never thought of himself in the same class as Dan Marino. Ditto.