After another heartbreaking Wisconsin loss this week and the loss of the axe to the Golden Gophers, some solace may come in the form of the passing game. Jim Sorgi had a career day, completing 23 of 34 attempts for 304 yards, four touchdowns, and only one interception as he calmly picked apart the Gopher secondary, who had only allowed six touchdown passes all year prior to the game.

“He really hung in there and made a lot of plays and put up big numbers,” Badger receiver Lee Evans said. “He played his heart out out there.”

Sorgi displayed his toughness time and time again as he completed key passes while staring down the oncoming Gopher rush.

“I took a couple of good shots, but that turf is kind of hard to play on, too, because once you get hit and then you hit that turf, it’s like getting hit twice,” Sorgi said.

“Sorgi, he’s real tough, and that’s what you need at quarterback,” wide receiver Brandon Williams said. “You need someone who is tough mentally as well as physically, and taking all those hits and still throwing for 305 yards, that’s real excellent, that’s what we need right now.”

The Badgers will continue to try to air it out this week against a weak Michigan State pass defense that has allowed the most passing yards per game of any school in the conference, as well as a conference leading twenty one touchdowns.

“Whenever we see a possibility to take of advantage of someone, we do it,” Evans said. “And if that means that (they) want to play man to man, then that means we’ve got to win over the top.”

However, the Spartans’ gambling style of man-to-man defense also has them best in the Big Ten in interceptions.

“They run a lot of man coverage schemes, so that’s going to get you beat a lot, but like you said, they have 14 picks, and that’s a lot of picks,” Williams said.

Even with the great success the Badgers experienced this past weekend, they are not giving up on the running game yet. If anything, this week may have demonstrated that the Badgers are quite capable of running a balanced attack.

“You know, traditional Wisconsin football, we going to run first and pass second,” Williams said, “so I do kind of expect it to go back to try and establish the run first, of course. But if we’ve got to pass, we’re going to throw the ball.”

“I mean, we still got to stick to our offensive philosophy, but we got to be able to throw the ball a certain degree as well,” Evans said. “I mean, obviously we have to do whatever it takes to win games, and if that means putting it up 50 times a game, we’ll put it up. But if they’re not stopping the run, then we’ll run it 50 times.”

While no one expects the passing game to take over the bulk of the offense, make no mistake about it: no one is buying into the myth that the Badgers cannot win passing the ball, either.

“No, I don’t buy into that,” Williams said. “I just think that people haven’t seen us win games throwing the ball, but that really doesn’t have anything to do with us throwing the ball. We can throw the ball whenever we really want to. So I’m not worried about people saying that if we got to throw the ball, we’re going to lose the game, because that’s just crazy. If we stop people on defense, we win the game, period. We could throw a thousand times, and it wouldn’t matter.”

“Whatever it takes to win,” Evans said, but there certainly will not be any grumbling from the receivers if what it takes to win includes an increased emphasis on the passing game.