Column: Grading Wisconsin football at the bye week
With the Badgers limping out to a 2-2 start, a bye week briefly pauses a two-game skid and offers a chance to reflect on the first third of the season.
This is by no means a final report card — regardless of how it may feel, the Wisconsin football team’s season is far from over. This is more like the mid-semester progress report you would hide from your parents.
We’re barely into Big Ten play, but the Badgers’ season is teetering on the precipice of disaster. Coming off perhaps the worst loss of the Luke Fickell era, a sentence I’ve become all too familiar with typing, Wisconsin is faced with a myriad of tough questions to which no one seems to have any answers.
Mercifully, the Badgers have a bye before they must travel to Ann Arbor to face Michigan in Week 6. That gives us a chance to exhale and take a more encompassing glance at how the season has unfolded.
Below, BadgerNotes.com grades various aspects of Wisconsin’s football team through four games, from faces new and old to glaring weaknesses and surprising bright spots, both on and off the field.
Jeff Grimes: C
Grimes’ vision is at least clear, and that’s more than can be said about the previous offensive regime. His pro-style, zone-running scheme, garnished with jet motions and play-action passes, is actually a quite appealing system to watch. The problem is that both his offensive line and quarterback could be the worst in the Big Ten.
The offensive front is an abject disaster. Riley Mahlman’s move to left tackle has significantly dropped his level of play. Jake Renfro has been banged up and neither of the other centers, Ryan Cory and Kerry Kodanko, have been playable. Meanwhile, on the right side, redshirt freshmen Colin Cubberly and Emerson Mandell have gotten waxed week after week, their inexperience painfully evident.
Danny O’Neil has been largely abysmal at quarterback. His touchdown-to-interception ratio of 5-5 sums up his play quite well: for every positive, there’s been an equally-as-pertinent, often-crippling negative.
Grimes simply doesn’t have the personnel to operate his offense at even close to full capacity at the moment. But he’s not off the hook for some questionable play calls, and ultimately it’s on him to make do with the pieces he has.
Front seven: A-
The two big storylines heading into the 2025 campaign were Wisconsin’s new offense and its rebuilt defensive front. We’ve already touched on Grimes, and now we’ll hit one of the few bright spots this team has shown through four games.
The Badgers’ coaching staff truthfully doesn’t deserve credit for much, but how they completely remade this front seven in one offseason should be applauded. Wisconsin surrendered 165.0 yards per game on the ground last fall; right now it sits at just 50.0 yards per game allowed, good for third-best in the country. The defensive line is big enough to be a handful for any offensive front, and more than one player can shed blocks this year, which certainly helps. The inside backers, meanwhile, are fast, physical and play downhill.
The pass rush has been a touch inconsistent, but the Badgers do have 10 sacks though four games, which is by no means elite but certainly a step in the right direction. Wisconsin’s pass-rushers are winning more of their reps, creating more pressure, and I tend to agree with Fickell that overall havoc is more important than actual sacks themselves. Plus, there’s a clear alpha quarterback hunter on the roster, Mason Reiger. He’s creating pressure on about 18% of his pass rush snaps, per numbers from Pro Football Focus.