Wisconsin?s two-faced football team is beginning to choose its path. Unfortunately for head coach Barry Alvarez and the UW seniors, it is becoming apparent that the direction the team is headed more closely resembles the one that showed in five bad losses than in the four promising wins.

The pasting by Indiana a few weeks ago was an embarrassment to tradition and to the program, but the 42-28 loss to Michigan State was like a Halloween house of horrors for Badger players who saw the field Saturday.

Well, maybe the time was fitting.

Is Camp Randall haunted?

UW has played significantly better in each of its road games this year, including close losses to Oregon and an explosive Illinois team.

The only ghosts hanging around the Badger football team lately, however, have been the specters of former special teams staples Vitaly Pisetsky and Kevin Stemke, who were noticeably still on the sidelines in plain clothes Saturday.

Maybe the players are losing confidence in themselves, the interpretation most of the Madison media has been tossing around. Maybe there aren?t enough veteran leaders like Wendell Bryant and Mark Anelli. Maybe there are just too many young players on the team.

Could be. But it should be important to note that there are people behind decisions like the one to start true freshman Scott Starks in Jamar Fletcher?s vacancy. They are the same minds that put Starks on the boundary side of the defense. The same minds that line him up with a ridiculous cushion in a vain attempt to keep bigger receivers from getting over the top of the UW secondary.

Starks should be playing: He has shown tremendous courage out there on the corner with some of the Big Ten?s top talent across the line from him. The 5-foot-10 freshman has shown flashes of his predecessor in coverage and sticks his shoulders into every tackle out on the perimeter. Nothing typified his season better than in the third quarter when Charles Rogers slipped by him for a 63-yard catch, but Starks stuck with the play and battled Rogers down at the seven-yard line.

He really should be in there. But there is a group of people that get paid to design schemes so that Starks doesn?t have to find himself in man coverage from the right flank to the deep third of the field against a receiver half a foot taller than him.

“I feel bad,” Alvarez said after the game. “I?m sure he gets frustrated.”

Fans are frustrated, too: How dare Alvarez tickle the people of Wisconsin with a pair of consecutive Rose Bowls and then fail to make the postseason two years later. Those who employ the expectations excuse ought to spend more time watching the games than reading newspapers, but the reality is apparent. The Badgers are greatly in danger of losing out on a bowl bid this December.

Part of it might be the style of play the 54-year-old coach chose to employ after overtime losses to Northwestern and Purdue in 2000 convinced him spread offenses can be effective. Too bad nobody pointed out that play fakes out of the spread only work if your team never runs out of it.

Wisconsin?s spread was so predictable it can now be found usually in a dumpster behind Camp Randall.

It?s just one of a number of questionable decisions by UW?s staff thus far. A few more were on display Saturday, even if the spread was not.

Whose bright idea was it to incorporate the “keeper” into Jim Sorgi?s playbook? Most of those draws and roll-outs look ill-conceived when Brooks Bollinger is performing them, and he?s got the tools to do it right. But there was Sorgi, executing designed runs against Michigan State. The coaches were practically asking for an injury and they got it, even if it did come on an impromptu third-down scramble.

So now Alvarez is faced with starting a third-stringer at quarterback, yet another freshman in the lineup.

He can?t control the youth of his team or the injuries, but he is in control. When a car crashes, police check the blood-alcohol content of the driver first.

The Badgers are obviously still on their way. They control their bowl destiny, even if they need to win out just to make it. It?s up to Alvarez to steer them, but they?re already three-quarters of the way down a road that led them to five losses.