The 2019 Wisconsin Football season is surely one to forget, but there are good things to take away from the year.
There’s a silver lining to everything, and that’s what I’m going to talk about today. The end of the Wisconsin Football season has come and gone with a victory over Miami in the Pinstripe Bowl, and we can look back now with settled emotions and a clear mind. When talking about last year, it isn’t fun, but it’s necessary.
The Badgers entered the season with hopes of competing for a spot in the College Football Playoff. The Big Ten champion didn’t receive a bid this year, again, so it may not have mattered what Wisconsin did beyond its loss to BYU early in the season, but it would have been a much more entertaining ride had they competed the rest of the year.
Wisconsin finished 8-5 while going 5-4 in Big Ten play and still managed to finish second in the Big Ten West. Northwestern ran away with the division. After the Badgers lost to Michigan, there was still hope. Then the loss to Northwestern signaled that Wisconsin had work to do. A tough game at Penn State didn’t go favorably for the road team, and the season was all but lost when the Axe was lost on home turf.
The slope was too slippery to regather any sort of footing on the season.
It was definitely one to forget and it won’t be brought up too often from this point forward by really any fans. But not everything about it was bad. Starting with the dominant win in the Pinstripe Bowl, here are five positive things from the dumpster fire that was the 2018 Wisconsin Football season.