Column: Wisconsin football has a spark, but isn't nearly hot enough to topple top programs
The Wisconsin Badgers' young talent showed promise again, but it wasn’t nearly enough to take down a ruthless Indiana team on the road.
Wisconsin football got steamrolled in Bloomington, Indiana, for the Badgers’ sixth loss in Big Ten play and their fifth blowout loss of the season.
A game that looked shockingly close at halftime, with the Hoosiers clinging to a 10-7 lead, quickly dissolved into a beatdown for the home team in the second half. Indiana, not typically one to play with its food under its second-year mastermind of a head coach, Curt Cignetti, took advantage of Wisconsin’s mistakes and ran away with the game to move to 11-0.
And yet, even as the Badgers crawled to another lopsided loss, the same embers that fueled the fire of Wisconsin’s stunning upset of Washington burned brightly against Indiana.
The difference? Indiana knows how to put out a fire. Washington let it spread and seep into every facet of the game.
Indiana has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s among the nation’s very select class of truly elite teams this season. They have a legitimate case for No. 1 in every poll and ranking.
Still, Wisconsin kept this game competitive for about two and a half quarters, largely off the backs of its young studs that, just a week ago, powered the Badgers to their first (and potentially lone) Big Ten win of 2025.
True freshman quarterback Carter Smith, whose rushing prowess helped Wisconsin topple the Huskies a week ago, got his first career start. Once again, his final numbers — 9-of-15 passing for 98 yards, one touchdown and one interception — don’t look pretty. But once again, he showed a lot of intriguing tools that, at the very least, have put him in the conversation to be the Badgers’ quarterback of the future.