At his Monday press conference, Wisconsin head football coach Bret Bielema confirmed reports he fired Mike Markuson as the team’s offensive line coach Sunday after just two games with the team.

The Wisconsin offensive line has severely underperformed this season, and Bielema cited “personal matters and a lot of things specific to the program” for deciding to make the change.

“It wasn’t a knee-jerk thing by me,” Bielema said. “It’s something we talked
about and processed through. He and I sat down together, had a good conversation
and [I] talked to him three or four times yesterday.”

The Wisconsin head coach added Markuson has a son who is a senior in high school, along with a daughter and wife back home in Mississippi, and those issues weighed heavily on the first-year UW coach since arriving in Madison. He also made it clear the offensive line’s early-season struggles had him thinking about promoting Bart Miller, in his second year on Wisconsin’s staff, to offensive line coach. 

After a tough road trip to Oregon State, Bielema said he decided to move forward with the change Sunday morning, but said it was a change he was already considering, especially on the long trip home. While recognizing it’s not normal to remove an assistant coach this early in the season, Bielema said as a young coach, he was often frustrated by the tendency to wait until the end of the year to make changes to the coaching staff.

“I always said to myself as I got older, as I grew into the
profession, if I was ever in a position where a transition needed to be made, I
wouldn’t wait until it was comfortable,” he said. “I was going to make a decision when it
needed to be made.

“I’m never going to delay a decision that I think will help us win football games.” 

Bielema said the first two people he informed of the decision – offensive coordinator Matt Canada and running backs coach Thomas Hammock – were both “taken aback” by the early season move. But after talking to the offensive players and the rest of his coaching staff, he’s confident he made the right decision, and Miller is ready to step in and restore this line to it’s traditionally high level of play. 

The usually dominant unit has looked weak in both run and pass blocking through two games this season, as the Badger offense has only gained 594 total yards in two games, a low number by Wisconsin standards. In a 10-7 road loss to Oregon State Saturday, quarterback Danny O’Brien was sacked three times, and the Badgers gained just 35 net yards on the ground behind an uncharacteristically poor performance from the offensive line.

“I’m not na?ve to the
fact that we’re not going to turn into what we’ve fortunately been able to
accomplish in the past overnight,” Bielema said. “But we’re going to take some baby steps and … we’re going to have a great amount of change in a short amount of
time.”

UW’s former offensive line coach, Bob Bostad, coached a unit that annually produced All-Americans for four years, but left the team after the 2012 Rose Bowl to take the same position with the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Miller, a former offensive guard at New Mexico, was coached by Bostad for the first two years of his college career before joining his former coach in Madison last season. 

“I don’t know if I would have made the move if I didn’t feel so good about his replacement,” Bielema said. “Give Bart his opportunity to hop into the role and a guy that can maybe marriage the bridge that we need now, especially at the offensive line.”