MADISON, Wis. — When Wisconsin began its football season, the list of goals the program established mirrored the expectations of most years. Become bowl eligible. Win the Big Ten West. Win the Big Ten championship. Earn a spot in the College Football Playoff.
Given that the Badgers were ranked in the top 20, favored to win their division and pushed an East Division team to the limit in the league title game three times the previous six seasons, three of those objectives at least seemed plausible. But as the losses piled up, most of the big-picture ambitions faded away.
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Now, all that’s realistically left is a single goal. And though it may not seem this way, it is a big one.
Wisconsin is 5-5 with two regular season games remaining and needs one victory against either Nebraska or Minnesota to ensure a spot in a bowl game. It won’t be a New Year’s Six game and almost surely will lack the prestige of the other upper-tier bowls. But right now, the Badgers are simply fighting for a chance.
“You always want the best one,” offensive lineman Tanor Bortolini said. “But at this point, as long as we get the opportunity to play one more game together, I think that’s what everyone wants. It doesn’t matter. It could be any bowl in the nation and I think we’d all be happy to go there.”
There are currently 65 bowl-eligible teams for 82 spots. Nineteen teams, including Wisconsin, are one win away from bowl eligibility. Any spots that aren’t filled by bowl-eligible programs go to the 5-7 teams with the best Academic Progress Rate, and there is a situation in which the Badgers could be one of those teams. Wisconsin’s APR of 992 on a 1,000-point scale would be the second-best among teams on the bowl border behind Rice (994), which is also 5-5.
However, sweating out a bowl bid without even recording a .500 record is something the Badgers would prefer to avoid. The Athletic projects Wisconsin to play in the Guaranteed Rate Bowl in Phoenix on Dec. 27 against Baylor.
“You get an extra game, why not go kick somebody’s (butt) in it?” tight end Hayden Rucci said. “It probably won’t be somebody in the Big Ten, somebody who doesn’t know us as well. So it’s fun just to kind of take it to somebody who isn’t expecting to play Wisconsin in a bowl game.”

Why does a bowl game appearance matter so much? Three reasons:
1. Wisconsin has qualified for a bowl game in 20 consecutive years, which is the third-longest active bowl game streak behind Georgia (25 years) and Oklahoma (23 years).
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2. Under NCAA rules, bowl teams are allowed to practice or hold other athletic activities up to four hours per day or 20 hours per week from the end of the regular season up to the bowl game. There isn’t a specific limit on the number of practices a team can hold during that stretch. Without a bowl bid, players can only weight train and condition until Jan. 1.
3. Interim coach Jim Leonhard could be on the cusp of earning the permanent head-coaching job, which presumably would occur in December with the transfer portal window and early signing period on the horizon. That would make bowl prep the first opportunity for Leonhard to put his spin on the program in the full-time role.
“Making a bowl is a huge accomplishment,” Leonhard said. “Not everyone gets that opportunity. It’s something you have to earn. So any time you put out a goal and reach it, maybe it’s not perfect. Maybe it’s not exactly what you wanted at the beginning of the season. But when you accomplish that goal of becoming bowl eligible, it’s a big accomplishment. There are a lot of teams that are hoping at the beginning of the season that they get there. It’s been very common here, but you have to earn it. You get what you earn.
“It would be huge for this team. We do have a young team, some inexperience and every time you step on the field is an opportunity to grow and get better and get closer as a team. Those practices are very valuable for a staff. And obviously, if I get named the head coach, it just provides you an opportunity where you have a little bit more time away from the game, you can kind of set the standard a little bit more and just put them in different situations to help them grow. Hopefully, it comes up in the game but really for the future as well.”
Wisconsin last missed a bowl game in 2001 when Barry Alvarez’s team finished 5-7 (Leonhard was a freshman walk-on). The Badgers were sitting at 5-5 with two regular season games left but lost at home to No. 11 Michigan and at Minnesota. Wisconsin played in the Alamo Bowl against Colorado in 2002 and has reached a bowl game every season since. Rarely have the Badgers been this late into a season without having already assured themselves of a postseason appearance. In fact, 14 times over the last 20 seasons Wisconsin reached six wins by the end of October.
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Two close calls came in 2008 and 2020. Bret Bielema’s 2008 team was 4-5 before rattling off three consecutive wins to close the regular season, including a 35-32 victory against Minnesota that made the Badgers bowl eligible and an infamous 36-35 overtime victory against FCS Cal Poly in which the Mustangs missed three extra points.
During Wisconsin’s pandemic-shortened 2020 season, the Badgers were 2-3 entering the final regular season game against Minnesota and escaped with a 20-17 overtime victory. Wisconsin went on to defeat Wake Forest 42-28 in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl.
To put into context just how impressive Wisconsin’s bowl streak is, consider that the longest active streak from a Big Ten program behind Wisconsin is Ohio State at nine years (the Buckeyes were ineligible for a bowl game in 2012 but went undefeated). Iowa has qualified for nine consecutive bowl game appearances, but the 2020 Music City Bowl was canceled because of issues related to the pandemic. Incredibly, no other Big Ten team has a current streak of longer than one year. Penn State and Minnesota declined bowl bids in 2020 with losing records.
“It’s been a tradition here,” Bortolini said. “This program hasn’t missed a bowl game in 20 years. Everyone’s aware. It’s something that’s emphasized. When you’re getting recruited here, it’s, ‘Yeah, we made a bowl game every single year since whenever.’ I think the big focus is we can’t be the first team to break that. No one wants to be the first. The focus is, ‘What can we do this week to make sure that doesn’t happen, make sure that we get the win this week?’”
Wisconsin has typically used the early portion of bowl practices as an opportunity for younger players to earn critical game-like snaps while the veterans rest and recover. Many of the younger players spend the season on the scout team learning the opponent’s plays, so December represents one of the first opportunities to show coaches their talent in Wisconsin’s system. Several upperclassmen have stressed just how much those additional practices earlier in their careers gave them confidence and provided a launching point when spring practice arrived.
Quarterback Graham Mertz said practices last year as Wisconsin prepared to play in the Las Vegas Bowl revealed the potential of wide receiver Skyler Bell, who played 14 snaps in the bowl game and emerged as a starter as a redshirt freshman this season.
“You figure out through those bowl practices of what guys are ready to step up and next year, what it’s going to look like for them,” Mertz said. “I think those bowl practices are huge. A lot of guys getting their bodies back, getting healthy, or just developing what you’ve done throughout the year. So they’re definitely big.”
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A bowl game would serve as a reward for a team that has endured its share of setbacks. Wisconsin opened the season 2-3, losing its first three games against Power 5 programs, which led athletic director Chris McIntosh to fire Paul Chryst and promote Leonhard, the team’s defensive coordinator. The Badgers, who were reeling, have been far from perfect on the field since then. But they have continued to battle, which stands out to offensive coordinator Bobby Engram.
“Earning that right to play in a bowl is a big accomplishment,” Engram said. “Sometimes you have to look at the adversity and things that you’ve been through as a gauge of success as well.”
And, finally, there is the Leonhard piece to this equation. While no specific win-loss record has been publicly stated by McIntosh for Leonhard to meet, a bowl game in a roller-coaster season like this would at least be considered a step in the right direction given where the team was Oct. 2. Leonhard, who currently is 3-2, steered the program through a tumultuous midseason stretch and has earned the respect of his players for his handling of the situation.
The specific bowl game would matter less than the opportunity it could provide Leonhard and Wisconsin to set the foundation for the future — and that may be most important of all.
“I think it’s vital,” Bortolini said. “Coach Leonhard definitely wants to be the head coach. We all want him to be the head coach. He’s a guy we all believe in, we all put our confidence in. He can say, ‘OK, I am the head coach. We’re going to show you, here’s how things are going to be going forward. Here’s how the winter is going to go.’
“It gives him an opportunity to establish what he wants to do. And then along with that, get the young guys working on some stuff where it’s, ‘Here’s what you are going to be doing for certain in the future.’ If he’s not the head coach, it’s like, ‘Well, who knows what happens after this?’ If coach Leonhard is named the head coach, it definitely would be beneficial for that.”
(Top photo: Jeff Hanisch / USA Today)
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