The 77,460 Badger fans at Camp Randall stadium breathed a collective sigh of relief as Josh Haldi’s fourth-down pass attempt was broken up by Scott Starks. The play sealed a 24-21 come-from-behind Wisconsin victory over a fired-up Northern Illinois squad that had the Badgers on their heels throughout the day.

The Wisconsin offense, which has usually been noted for its powerful running attack throughout the Barry Alvarez era, was completely ineffective during the majority of the game. UW managed only a paltry 68 yards on the ground against an NIU defense that allowed an average of 230 rushing yards in the team’s previous two games.

Wisconsin’s inability to move the ball on the ground allowed the Huskies to send aggressive blitz packages against the UW pass offense. The Badgers had shown susceptibility to the blitz earlier this season against Fresno State and UNLV.

However, the offense’s ability to handle the Northern Illinois blitz could only be described as a complete failure. The Wisconsin offense was pressured throughout the day by the pass-rush and quarterback Brooks Bollinger was sacked an astounding 10 times Saturday afternoon.

“You can’t play football like that today, on offense, and expect to win a game,” said offensive coordinator Brian White. “I think it is pretty easy to understand that. I think everybody that was at that football game today knows that we were outplayed and out-hit. Quite honestly, they deserved to win that game.”

Northern Illinois had seven different players with sacks. The group was led by Larry Williams, who finished the day with three sacks for negative 27 yards. NIU employed a scheme in which safeties and linebackers came on delayed blitzes.

“I think a couple of times we broke down,” said Wisconsin head coach Barry Alvarez. “But I thought they came up with a nice plan. They used a delayed blitz with a scraping linebacker and our linemen had a hard time finding him. I think a couple of times our back missed a couple of blocks. So there’s three sacks right there.”

The inability to protect the quarterback while being unable to run had Wisconsin coaches in the quandary of running for no gain or allowing the oncoming blitzers repeated chances to tee off against Bollinger.

Wisconsin was eventually able to put together a final drive that was aided by Northern Illinois penalties to score the game-winning touchdown on a Bollinger keeper. Prior to that drive, observers had to wonder if Bollinger would be able to finish the game after taking as many hits as he did.

Despite the 10 sacks, Bollinger was able to connect on 15 of 23 passes for 207 yards. Over the last two games he has piled up 475 yards passing while hitting on 67 percent of his passes. The good numbers through the air have been forced in part by uncharacteristically low numbers in the run game from Wisconsin.

Saturday’s outing was the third consecutive game in which the Wisconsin offense failed to produce a 100-yard rusher, something the Badgers had become accustomed to. Starting tailback and preseason All-American Anthony Davis was held to just 49 yards after finishing last week with only 75 yards against West Virginia.

Some of the blame for the poor running attack has fallen on Davis, who has appeared to have his timing slightly off this season, but after giving up 10 sacks and failing to produce any large holes, the offensive line, once thought to be the strength of team, looks like they might be struggling.

“I don’t know if we are really struggling,” said left tackle Ben Johnson. “I think we are not seeing all the blitzes they are putting against us. We are still going hard every play, but we just have to correct little things.”

Wisconsin coaches insist that they will be fine in the running game this season but the team is currently in the midst of a drought on the ground that has not often been seen with Alvarez as head coach. Several years ago the Wisconsin coaching staff made a move to revamp the Badger passing attack, and while coaches are concerned about the inability to run recently UW isn’t about to move away from their bread and butter if they can help it.

“I’m concerned about a lot of things, we’ll have to take a look at the film and really start to identify, honestly, what the problems are,” said Brian White. “We’ll correct them and maybe give our players a better chance to succeed, because obviously today we as coaches didn’t give them the greatest plan.”
“If we don’t correct these mistakes, we are going to end up last,” Johnson said. “Alvarez doesn’t accept it–that is the way Alvarez is. He doesn’t accept mistakes and we are not going to make any more.”