Wisconsin Football: Badgers see impressive streak end in 2018
Wisconsin football was a part of an impressive NCAA record-breaking streak that finally came to an end in 2018.
The phrases “football school” and “basketball school” get thrown around quite a bit in collegiate sports. For instance, a look at the Kansas Jayhawks — who are fresh off another sub-.500 season in football — is currently enjoying a 2018 NCAA Tournament run in basketball.
Other schools enjoy the flip side of that, where they see their school bring in gratuitous amounts of success in football, only to see it diminish once basketball season hits.
For the Wisconsin Badgers, the two terms are not applicable as the university has seen great success in both sports in recent history. In fact, the Wisconsin Badgers can be seen as the most successful athletic program of the two sports combined over the last 15 years.
Wisconsin Football is coming off a 13-win season in which they were one step away from a College Football Playoff (CFP) berth and enjoyed an Orange Bowl victory in a defacto road game over the Miami Hurricanes. The bowl appearance pushed the football program’s streak to 16 straight seasons appearing in the postseason.
As for their basketball team, the Badgers missed out on the NCAA Tournament in 2018 for the first time in 20 seasons. Both the football and basketball teams’ streaks were and are amongst the top five current streaks in both respective sports.
More impressively, the Badgers owned the longest streak in the country in which both the football and basketball teams made the postseason, meaning a bowl game and NCAA Tournament berth. Prior to 2018, Wisconsin held a 15-year streak in which both programs saw the postseason. No other program currently has double digits of that mark and the Badgers hold the all-time record as they surpassed the Texas Longhorns who held a 12-year streak from 1998-2010.
Ironically, the Badgers have experienced a dark history in which they went postseason-less, with their most noticeable streak lasting 1947-1993 in which they did not make the NCAA Tournament in basketball.
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A good reason for their turnaround is current athletic director Barry Alvarez, who served as the football coach in the 1990s and early 2000s. The football team remains in good shape to make a tournament run and with the basketball team experiencing injuries and young growing pains, a new streak could be in the making as early as next year.