Say this for Bret Bielema: When he bolted from Wisconsin, it at least made a lick of sense. “Bert” was apparently unhappy with how much he was allowed to pay his assistants (which is fair, considering NC State pays its assistants more than Wisconsin) and had seen coaching staff after coaching staff lose key football minds to more aggressive schools. The sparkle and money of the SEC shone bright, so Bielema made a career move that was at the very least lateral and was understandable when you consider what the SEC was at the time: the only way to win a national championship.
Most of the Wisconsin fanbase also seemed to dislike Bielema as a person, between the arrogant sound bites and rumors of him picking up coeds at bars. “Bert” bolting for another job played into the narrative of him being someone you don’t want to represent your football program. Overall, it was a divorce that made sense.
Now, we’ve got the mystery of Gary Andersen. Oregon State is not a good job. Mike Riley kept his head coaching position for well more than a decade by virtue of most in Corvallis knowing they likely wouldn’t have done better in a coaching search if they had fired him. Nebraska hiring the man was a bizarrely low-ceiling hire (which now looks like a House of Cards-esque revenge intent on disabling a Wisconsin program prone to humiliating the Huskers). The University of Oregon program keeps growing larger and will have first crack at all recruits in Oregon, California and the rest of the West for the foreseeable future. For all the hay made about Wisconsin refusing to pay its assistant coaches competitively, Oregon State paid its assistants even less this past season.
We’ve had reports from ESPN that Andersen was frustrated with the high academic requirements at Wisconsin, which would make sense if it weren’t for Andersen’s previous adamant proclamations of the importance of “student” in student-athlete. Andersen always praised the character of his players and was impressive in his first press conference as Wisconsin head coach, when he said “Academics are very important. The academics at University of Wisconsin and the athletic program as a whole are unbelievable. To say you have a football team that is a 3.0 GPA or very close to a 3.0 GPA is unbelievably impressive. That's a credit to the young men. It's a credit to the support and everybody that's around them at a quality university. A degree from the University of Wisconsin goes a long ways.”
The idea that Andersen secretly detested Wisconsin's high admission standards is surprising, and has led to an incredibly stupid debate over the practicality of high academic standards, championed by Darren "thinks Penn State and Maryland are harder to get into than Wisconsin" Rovell of ESPN and others. If Andersen didn't like the ideal he claimed to take pride in, his departure might have been best for everyone.
We could also say Andersen was always a West guy and was looking for opportunities in his own territory. Bruce Feldman of Fox Sports reported that Andersen was eager to leave if a better chance ever came around. Barry Alvarez said Andersen made the move for his family, which is hard to believe when you consider Andersen has a son playing on the team (who learned of the news in as cold a way as possible) and another employed as a graduate assistant. Maybe Gary missed his cousins a lot more than any of us miss our cousins, who knows?
From what we’ve learned, it’s basically impossible for Andersen to have believed what he said when he first joined the program. This man once proclaimed “If you were asked and take every head coach and every position coach in America and every level of college football and ask them to draw up the Top 20 best college football programs in the country, I guarantee Wisconsin is on 99.9 percent of those ballots that you gather. That makes it a special place from a football standpoint.” Apparently, that other .1 percent was Andersen himself, who had Oregon State on his Top 20.
All along, Andersen saw his job in Madison as a stepping stone for a Pac-12 job, because that’s the only reason that makes immediate and objective sense. Andersen disliked the environment in Madison enough to go from an objectively Top 5 program in the Big Ten to easily a bottom half squad in the Pac-12.
Because of its use as a launchpad by two coaches in two years, we now have to deal with the idea that Wisconsin is not a destination job, which means fans will reflexively try to pull in Wisconsin alums, like former quarterbacks Paul Chryst and Darrell Bevell, with the idea that they would never dare leave their beloved alma mater. This ignores that Chryst has not registered a record better than 7-6 at Pitt or that Bevell is very much ingrained in the NFL and would likely prefer a job there. That’s what the departure of Bielema and Andersen has done: make Badger Nation overly worried over whether their new hire likes them or like-likes them.
However, there’s another possibility for Andersen leaving that we still can’t say for certain has legs, but would be devastating if it turns out to be true: that Barry Alvarez is suffocating this program. That the creator of modern Wisconsin football is also responsible for its limit. There is no way at the moment to believe this for certain, but we are now looking at a job two pretty good coaches have decided to leave for teams that aren’t even among the better half in their respective conferences.
It could be that Alvarez sits on his throne as the man embodying Wisconsin football and decrees that if he didn’t need millions upon millions to pay his assistants and funding for recruiting efforts as a head coach, neither should the current coach. All while Alvarez pulls in the fourth-highest athletic director salary in the country. If this happens again and the coaching hire Alvarez said would be his last during his Wednesday night press conference also leaves, it will be time for the Wisconsin Athletic Board to look in the mirror and ask themselves “Is Barry still the right man to run our athletic department?”
But that’s still years away and purely hypothetical. For now, we can try to ascribe as many reasons as we want and attempt to make this all explainable, but this simply remains the bizarre career move of a man completely divergent from the public face he displayed.
Why do you think Gary Andersen left? What do you think this means for Wisconsin long term? Let Jack know on Twitter (@jfordbaer) and through email (jack.baer@dailycardinal.com).
