When the Michigan Wolverines take the field at Camp Randall Stadium Saturday, they won't be looking to shore up a resume for a BCS berth or gearing up for a dynamic rivalry game with Ohio State. No, on Saturday they will be fighting for their first FBS win since September and their best chance for bowl eligibility.
How the mighty have fallen.
But Michigan's tale of woe should give pause to people who jump quickly to say a coach is not delivering good enough results.
Lloyd Carr had a dominating 13-season run that included a national title, five Big Ten titles and only one year below the eight-win mark. But by the end of his tenure, much of the fan base was beside itself with anger at how the team had slipped and kept losing to Ohio State. They expected more from Michigan football.
Since then the team is 8-14 under new head coach Rich Rodriguez and suffered its first losing season since Lyndon Johnson was president. His squad is 5-5 (1-5 in the Big Ten) with its last two games against top-20 teams.
Now this is not to say that Michigan can't return to its former stature under Rodriguez, but the change has been difficult, and in retrospect, it seems a little foolish to have called for the retirement of a coach who won the Wolverines' only national title since 1948.
And it's not like Michigan's story is an uncommon one.
Look at Nebraska, which in 25 years under Tom Osborne won over 80 percent of its games, took home three national titles and never had a worse record than 9-4. His replacement, Frank Solich, did not have as sterling a record, but three top-10 finishes and 58 wins over six seasons were nothing to scoff at.
But then Solich fell victim to inflated expectations.
He was fired by Athletic Director Steve Pederson, who explained he would not let ""the program gravitate into mediocrity,"" adding, ""We won't surrender the Big 12 to Oklahoma and Texas.""
Solich had gone 9-3 in his last year, but I guess the team just wasn't enough of a contender.
The replacement, former NFL coach Bill Callahan, only lasted four years, struggling to two losing seasons, as many as the Huskers had in the previous 44 years. The Big 12 was surrendered to Texas and Oklahoma, and Nebraska's northern division has become the second class of the league.
There are other similar stories like Glen Mason at Minnesota or David Cutcliffe at Ole Miss, who were both fired because the level of success they brought grew stale and restless fan bases demanded more. Neither of their replacements has set the world on fire, nor did they turn the respective schools into recruiting powerhouses or even contenders.
These stories should serve as a warning to the group of mouthy fans who were coming after Wisconsin's Bret Bielema when the team had just lost to the Buckeyes and Hawkeyes, or last year when firebretbielema.com started garnering publicity. The complaints came: He couldn't win a big game, the team was trending downward.
After three years, a downward trend? Never mind that teams usually get worse after a 12-1 season (year one) and often get worse after a 9-4 season (year two), three years is a ludicrously small sample size to decide that a program is on a downward trend.
The point is that a coaching change must be borne not from frustration with sustained success (calling a 7-5 year bad might just be the definition of sustained success), but from a real opportunity to move the program to a higher level.
It is not easy to vault from being a pretty good team (where Wisconsin is) to being a consistently great team (Ohio State, Oklahoma and where some delusional Badger fans imagine Wisconsin should be). The Badgers only recently moved from the consistently bad level to pretty good; if another leap forward comes, it will take time.
But for now Bielema, is still the head coach, and this year he's done a pretty good job. Barring a collapse down the stretch, Wisconsin should win between 9 and 11 games depending on its bowl opponent.
So the fans who hoped to replace Bret just a few weeks ago should take a long, hard look at where the Wolverines are right now. If the Badgers took a fall like Michigan has in the past two years, it would take a very long time to recover.
Still think the next Jim Tressel or Urban Meyer is out there for the Badgers to snap up? Tell Ben who it is at breiner@wisc.edu.
