Home Games: A Banner Weekend in Wisconsin

As we’ve done each Fall for the past 10 or so years, my Dad and I just had our Wisconsin football trip, where we travel to the best weekend combination of Badgers/Packers games. It’s always a big highlight of my year, and this one might be unsurpassable in the annals of history as far as what our teams were able to do for us.

We headed up from Chicago on Friday afternoon, dropped our stuff at our family friends Jim and Nancy’s house, ate some authentic* Madison cuisine at Buffalo Wild Wings, and made our way to the Kohl Center to see Wisconsin unveil their Final Four banner and kick off basketball season. Along with our friend Jim, we snuck into about as good of seats as exist from a vantage standpoint (courtside would be cooler for sheer speed and sound purposes, but these are better for diagnosing what’s going on in the game):

The key to sneaking into these seats was walking purposefully past the usher like we knew what we are doing. It helped that I was accompanied by two upstanding-looking adults. We’d actually been closer to the corner for the banner drop, gotten ousted from those seats by their rightful owners, and seen that there was a large swath of empties at center-court.

It’s hard to tell a whole lot about the Badgers from the blowout over Northern Kentucky. There were stretches where the offense sputtered, but also ones where they looked like the team heralded as national championship contenders. These are maybe the highest expectations ever for Wisconsin basketball — though it’s worth nothing that the 2006-07 team led by Alando Tucker was ranked ninth overall in the preseason and made it to no. 1 (for a couple days) — and a December 3rd home game against Duke is fast-approaching. There’s a little bit of a fear that they’d be full of themselves after losing just one rotation player (Ben Brust) from their Final Four team and Frank Kaminsky’s been on national magazine covers, but Bo Ryan would seem to be the ideal antidote for any complacency.

“I’m going to change the karma of this game,” he loudly announced after Nebraska took a 14-point lead to everyone around us, who in turn looked at him like he was a crazy person. “Max, switch seats with me.”

Now, I don’t want to say that this adjustment was the only reason Wisconsin subsequently went on a 56-0 tear and Melvin Gordon set an all-time FBS rushing record, but it was definitely a major part. You could not convince me otherwise. Feeling like you have some sort of spiritual impact on games is part of watching sports. It’s illogical and irrational to feel that way, but so is rooting for laundry, sometimes on the basis of geographic location and sometimes based on other factors that make little sense in retrospect. Deep down, every big sports fan has lucky apparel or some other ritual, that don’t actually always work, but do always get credit from their enactor when they comes through. Everyone around us acknowledged that my Dad had totally swung the game.

To toot my own horn, I was one of the charter members of the Melvin Gordon bandwagon (though I did also send this tweet in the second quarter on Saturday). I know I’m a Wisconsin homer and whatnot, but my friends and I were advocating for him to poach carries from Montee Ball during the season after he’d set the all-time rushing touchdowns record. Everything Gordon’s done this season has felt like being early investors in a skyrocketing stock. Russell Wilson, Chris Borland, and JJ Watt have been the same way (Watt less so as a first round pick, but he’s got football lifers calling him historically brilliant), and it’s been a peculiar thing in an era of sports media over-saturation to continually see Wisconsin football players flying under the national radar until they just cannot be ignored.

Anyways, that was obviously a special day to be at Camp Randall. The occasion was so joyous that it didn’t really ever feel cold, even amidst snow and swirling winds. This wasn’t a cupcake-walk over Wofford. It was the systematic destruction of higher-ranked Nebraska, the toughest team on our (crap) regular season schedule, for pole position in reaching the B1G Championship Game. Is it a huge disappointment that inadequate quarterback play cost them earlier games against LSU and Northwestern, and what would’ve now been national title contention? Of course, but there are still some big goals at stake in mid-November, as well as the opportunity to watch a veritable thoroughbred. As a fan, you can’t ask for much more than that.

And then there was Lambeau, which remains my holy grail in sports. My Dad, our friend Rob (a longtime season ticket-holder who has been very generous at getting seats for us every year), and I stopped at Tabbert’s, an exquisite greasy spoon diner in Rosendale (a small town notorious for its 24/7 speed trap), before staying overnight in Oshkosh on Saturday night. The next morning, we left for Green Bay, stopping at a supermarket along the way to pick up copious amounts of beef sticks and (non-fried) cheese curds. All of this has ensured that my trainer will take one look at my protruded stomach and put me in a world of severe pain later this week. We set up shop for the noon games at Stadium View, and were eventually joined by my Dad’s colleague Franco and their friend Ian.

Lambeau was majestic. There is no feeling in the world for me like walking out of the tunnel and staring across the green and gold landscape, feeling all of the history that’s transpired there. I’ve given the crowd a hard time in recent months, but it was great on Sunday (perhaps because the team hasn’t faced much adversity other than a loss in New Orleans since its 1-2 start). From the opening kickoff, the Packers just dominated. It’s a team game, etc., but words cannot describe how lucky we Green Bay fans are to have Aaron Rodgers in our lives. As Lisk wrote on Monday, the quarterback is playing at a level that almost isn’t fair. How do you stop this?

So long as Rodgers is healthy, you feel like this team has a shot at a championship every year. The defense was swarming, too, and has been forcing turnovers with a consistency not seen since the Super Bowl season. At +14, the Packers lead the league in turnover differential — next-best New England is three behind at +11. Detroit’s loss in Arizona was sugar on top.

In summation, the teams I was rooting for outscored their opponents 174-75. Nothing can compare to the spontaneous joy of a hard-fought, last second victory, but the stressfree variety is pretty damn satisfying. Whether or not any of these seasons culminate in championships (obviously not in the cards for Wisconsin football), the journey sure has been fun.

[Photos via AP, Getty, and Me]