Blowout loss at Iowa last season had Wisconsin seeing red this offseason

LAS VEGAS — “Iowa 42.”

That’s a phrase Wisconsin football strength and conditioning coach Brady Collins forced upon Badger players this offseason. It refers to their 42-10 loss to the Hawkeyes at Kinnick Stadium last Nov. 2.

It was a brow-raiser at the time, but turned out to be the second of five straight Wisconsin defeats to close the season. That sent the 5-7 Badgers home for the winter with the program’s first losing record in 24 years.

Collins used the number 42 in concluding offseason workouts for his players, having them do 42 sit-ups or squats or something.

“Because when have you ever heard of Iowa scoring 42 points ever? Like ever?” Wisconsin senior linebacker Darryl Peterson Jr. told the Wisconsin State Journal in April. “For me, yeah, that one. … Forty-two is unacceptable to anybody, but especially those guys.”

Peterson’s feelings about the Hawkeyes’ offense weren’t meritless. Its 42 points against Wisconsin was Iowa’s highest point total since midseason 2021. The Hawkeyes rushed for a season-best for 329 yards in that game.

It was the Hawkeyes’ biggest winning margin against the Badgers since 1968, and third-straight win in the balanced series.

Most of all, it simply wasn’t the Badgers we’ve known since Barry Alvarez breathed life into them in the early 1990s.

At Wednesday’s Big Ten football media day session here, a couple Badger players discussed the subject without taking a jab at the Hawkeyes.

“They put 42 up on us and they rammed the ball down our throats,” said Wisconsin senior center Jake Renfro. “So we chose the number 42 to remember how bad we got beat by a rival.

“The week before, we played Penn State. It was a close battle and we lost. We did a very poor job of moving on, letting that one go, learning from it and moving on to a rival. We did not do a good job of fixing our mentality to go play Iowa.

“I’m not trying to make excuses. They beat us fair and square.”

The 42s, Renfro said, were part of “whatever kind of crazy workout the coach wants us to do that day. It was mostly push-ups. Sometimes squats, sometimes lunges.

“You do 42 reps of something, it’s hard.”

Badger junior cornerback Ricardo Hallman said “We weren’t proud of the performance (Iowa) put on us, and we know how important it is to get back on the right side of that rivalry and win that game.

“So we tried to put the number 42 at the end of our workouts, whether that’s 42 push-ups, 42 sit-ups after practice, 42 this, 42 that.”

Wisconsin Coach Luke Fickell, the 2021 National Coach of the Year at Cincinnati, tried to reinvent the wheel after taking the Wisconsin job. The Badgers bulled their way to decades of success with power football on both sides. Fickell switched the offense to the Air Raid, but that spread offense was a bust.

He fired offensive coordinator Phil Longo before last season ended. We’ll see how the Badgers transition goes under new OC Jeff Grimes, who uses an attack he created that he calls the RVO — Reliable Violent Offense.

After his December hiring by Fickell, Grimes said "I'd like to say that if people watched us, they would see a tough, physical brand of football that is balanced in a number of different ways."

The Badgers got a stern message last week when former Wisconsin All-America and future Pro Football Hall of Famer J.J. Watt spoke to the current Badgers in Madison.

“J.J. came in and said what needed to be said,” Hallman said. “Coach Fickell reiterates all those things to us all the time. But it’s different when you have a guy who been in the jersey, who’s been in the past, who played when Wisconsin was at the top of college football, going to Rose Bowls and competing for Big Ten championships consistently.

“Him, letting us know that he wasn’t proud of what we’ve been putting on tape, is super-important. I think that resonated with the guys very well. We’re trying to get back to the right way of things.”

It probably won’t be a quick fix. Here is the Badgers’ October: At Michigan, Iowa, Ohio State, at Oregon.

“This isn’t the Big Ten West anymore,“ Fickell said.

Until things change, it isn’t Wisconsin anymore, either.

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