Let's start here: It's not the bitter winds upon the frozen tundra that stop Wisconsin from effectively throwing the football. One hundred forty miles to the north, Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers threw for approximately 150,000 yards for the Packers while playing deeper into the winter than the Badgers ever do.
No, Wisconsin will run the ball again for the same reason eagles don't swim. It's just the laws of nature.
Since Barry Alvarez's 1990 hiring and Wisconsin As We Know It began, the Badgers essentially operated within the same culture from '90 through 2022 with a 2-year break in between. That 2-year break was Gary Andersen's 2013-14 tenure, in which he went a respectable 19-7 but both sides could not hit the eject button fast enough. His departure led to hiring the ultimate Madison Man in Paul Chryst, a Madison native who played Wisconsin and assisted for the Badgers in two separate stints. His teams won division titles three times from 2016-19, but Wisconsin surprisingly moved after a 9-4 mark in 2021 and a 2-3 start to 2022.
Opting not to promote interim head coach (and beloved former Badger) Jim Leonhard, Wisconsin instead hired outsider Luke Fickell as head coach, who in turn hired outsider Phil Longo to bring the Air Raid to Madison.
Though Longo puts more emphasis on the run game than Air Raid OG Mike Leach, the end result was a program that finished first or second in the Big Ten in rushing 11 times in the 15 seasons between 2007-21 slipped to fifth, sixth and eighth in the conference over the past three seasons. Longo was let go after a 16-13 loss to No. 1 Oregon on Nov. 16; it was the Badgers' fifth loss of the season to that point, and they'd scored 10 or 13 points in four of the five. An eighth place finish in rushing was not offset by an increase in passing; UW finished ninth, ninth and 16th in passing efficiency in three seasons with Longo at the controls.
And so now Jeff Grimes, an offensive line coach by trade, is running the Wisconsin offense. He took the job despite never having worked with Fickell previously, and despite not being able to bring any position coaches with him. (It probably doesn't hurt that Wisconsin AD Chris McIntosh is a former Wisconsin O-lineman himself.)
“I identify with it, you know?” Grimes said back in January on leaving Kansas one year into a 3-year, $1.3 million offensive coordinator deal to take the same job at Wisconsin. “I walk in and immediately the offensive linemen on the team kind of gravitate towards me and my experience. And I do the same. I think that’s for sure the truth, and it’s kind of cool because I've been at a number of places where there wasn't an inherent reason that the job was a great fit for me. It was just a job, and my style of offense didn't necessarily need to be what was run at any other place. At Baylor, for instance, it just was what I chose. Here, it's almost like it chose me.”
Grimes's work at Baylor, at least initially, was among the best by an assistant coach in college football in some time. Baylor leaped from 123rd nationally in rushing to 10th upon Grimes's arrival, along the way improving from 2-7 to 12-2 and Big 12 and Sugar Bowl champions. Baylor fell back to 111th in rushing by 2023, and Grimes was off to Kansas. His one year in that job saw KU rush for five more yards per game, but score five fewer points per contest.
Back to the top, the Packers threw their way to consistent success under Favre and Rodgers because they can draft their quarterbacks, and the Packers drafted Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers. The last Wisconsin quarterback drafted before the third round was Russell Wilson, who played one year for the Badgers. The last one before that? Ron Miller, taken in the third round by the LA Rams in 1961.
For Fickell, the change from Longo to Grimes is about supply and demand and allocation of resources. It's tough to base your offensive system around the hardest position for your program to acquire.
“I want to be in a system that we would call more of an NFL system, where obviously the quarterback is still the most important thing in what you do, especially offensively. But, they do understand that there’s more to it than just the quarterback. If the quarterback is having a tougher day, which you hear all the time in the NFL, where the quarterback was 12/28 but they still won 24-17 because they have balance. Because they can rely upon not just the run game, the big guys up front, but also some play-action stuff that can take some of the pressure off of just the quarterback," he told Jim Rome back in June. “That balance is what Jeff Grimes brings, and I think he’ll be what is a big, big difference-maker for us and our program.”
A Jeff Grimes Wisconsin offense is not going to be 32 personnel with 10 throws per game. It'll be downfield shots predicated on the threat of the run game.
"A lot of motions, a lot of shifts, kinda messing with your eyes," Badger linebacker Christian Alliegro said this week of what he's seen from the Wisconsin so far.
Unlike past offensive coordinators he's worked for, Grimes will collaborate with the existing staff, something of a two-way trust-building exercise between he and his new colleagues. The end result will likely be that Wisconsin identity won't be found in a formation, a play or a concept, but in how they play the game.
“That's who we are at our core, it's what's inside of us,” Grimes told the Wisconsin State Journal. “You cut us, and it bleeds out. But then there are certain things that we believe because of our identity, and so hopefully those two things align together. And so anywhere I've been, there's that schematic part that then is followed by a list of core beliefs and a list of five things that we really try to emphasize as an offense because of who we are. We have a core statement, a little, probably 40-50 word statement, that really defines how we're going to play football, and how our personality is going to come out as you see us play the game.”
If all goes well, by October that 40-50 word statement could be cut down all the way to three: It's Wisconsin football.