It’s beginning to feel a lot like college football. There is a crisp chill in the air. Leaves have turned. And the Wiscon-sin Badgers aren’t playing like they’re studying for a mid-term.
People keep asking me, Did you see that game last week? What a game: they answer their own question. It sure was surprising . . . except, uncannily not so. So there was this comeback from 17-0 two years ago at Ohio State. That wasn’t why UW stomped on the Buckeyes’ debutante ball Saturday.
Seven games, with a week off in reference of trag-edy, are a long time in college football. A lot can happen, so much that it becomes too complicated to dissect the psyche of a team and ex-plain why some-thing like what occurred in Co-lumbus did, in fact, happen.
Saturday, a pool of sports writers sat with cheat sheets and sharpened pencils in a state of mock euphoria after the game (sports writers, as you know, do not emote). Instead of an exam, they got Barry Alvarez, live on center stage and in town for one night only.
Alvarez grinned and guffawed and told stories about his kickers and joked about how he expected to win all along.
Something interesting happened too: Alvarez would not shut up. He’d answer a question and pause, but instead of waiting for another question, he’d go off on a tangent of his own, unsolicited. Barry Alvarez, the man who controls his comments better than his program, was volunteering information to the writers.
Alvarez was, of course, excited. Just moments earlier he and Joey Boese were swept off the field in each others arms like long-lost family members–the jolly old uncle em-bracing his weeping nephew who has returned from the war.
But candidness was an unexpected bonus. So while we all scrambled to jot down the gift, hoping to catch some kind of extra insight into the Badgers’ win, the real answer was hunched down before us in front of a microphone.
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What’s the goal of big time college football? To get better each week, keep winning and moving up the rankings? To answer the question, “Who’s No. 1?,” which is being spouted back and forth by ABC commentators in promo-tion of next week’s BCS standings? Maybe it is all that stuff.
So where does 4-3, headed for Champaign, Ill., fit into it?
“It’s all about playing football and having a good time,” Anthony Davis said.
Alvarez’ looseness seems to have rubbed off on his players, unless it was the other way around, and it is about time.
I wrote a few weeks ago about how a team deals with a blowout. The Badgers found themselves in that curious en-vironment in the loss to Indiana, and they surprised me af-terward by saying they just had to forget about the score and keep playing football. There wasn’t really a good time to be had, but players hugged one another when touch-downs were scored and interceptions were made.
It might have been the worst loss of the Alvarez era, when considering the expectations of each team involved and contrasting that with the difference in score, but Wiscon-sin’s young men found a way to dig past the heavy implica-tions and find the kernel of college football underneath.
And they kept playing. The good time came the following week.
If the Indiana game gave UW the perspective, Ohio State gave them the confidence they could still play with any-body. The combination of those two remarkable afternoons may be conspiring to produce one of the purest ways a team can go about finishing a season once it has three losses after just seven games–unconcernedly.
That sense of relaxation, looseness or whatever is precisely what enables someone to live in the moment. In football, that translates to playing the game on the schedule instead of worrying about polls and standings.
Whether the remainder of the season brings wins or not (Davis assured me the team is still focused on progress and, this week, beating Illinois) they’ve got the right way of going about it.
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As Davis and I spoke yesterday after practice, Alvarez was busy putting on a cheerful sweater vest. Four days to an-other crucial conference road trip and the domineering pa-triarch came out of the locker room in the mood for whis-tling and chatting to awkward college newspaper writers.
That subtle calmness ignores the Bowl Championship Se-ries or the Big Ten Championship. These, of course, are still goals, but they aren’t necessarily ends.
After all, when athletes look back on their playing days, they don’t remem-ber trophies or a lack thereof, they remember tackles and touchdowns and Saturday afternoons.
