SMQ: Wisconsin, Oregon football offer New Year’s nightmare at Rose Bowl

In the last column of 2019, Sunday Morning Quarterback gets personal about a personal conflict in the matchup between Oregon football and Wisconsin.

New Year’s Day is a time of renewal, when we flip the odometer on the year of our collective existence and celebrate fresh opportunities with friends and family. We shake off the hangover of the previous night’s reverie and make resolutions for self-improvement that we hope to put into practice over the next 365 days. It offers a time for reflection and introspection.

New Year’s Day is also the traditional space when the college football season winds down to a close. In recent decades, the advent of national championship games under the Bowl Coalition, Bowl Alliance, BCS, and College Football Playoff have pushed that calendar beyond January 1 and caused it to run a week or more into the new year.

Still, New Year’s Day holds an outsized significance in our hearts both broadly as human beings attuned to the cyclic rhythms of chronology and more specifically as college football fans conditioned to think of the turn of the calendar as the conclusion of the previous four-plus months of gridiron action.

Normally in this space, we drift more toward technical and statistical topics than the visceral feelings that lead us toward fanaticism. As we approach the end of 2019 and wind down the latest college football season, though, there is something I need to discuss earnestly. Consider this week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback a case study in split loyalties and the veritable quandary that can a rise from rooting for more than one college football team.

Setting the stage for the nightmare scenario

As a fan of the sport who was born in Wisconsin, I was brought up by Badgers fans. Raised in Wyoming after moving there as a five-year-old, my college football fandom developed at a time when the Cowboys were a rising power under Joe Tiller. Then I spent nearly six years working at the University of Oregon before completing my undergraduate studies there and staying to get  a Master’s degree in history.

As a result of this state-hopping lifestyle, I have several rooting interests on the gridiron. Anyone who follows the Saturday Blitz Podcast or has read my columns over the years is well aware of my split loyalties.

That brings us to this season, where the 2020 Rose Bowl game features the Pac-12 champion Ducks against a Badgers team that won the Big Ten West but lost to Ohio State in the conference title game. For most, this is a perfectly satisfactory matchup between two programs that have already won at least 10 games this year. For me, this is a nightmare that has played out only once before.

When the New Year’s Six bowls were first announced on ESPN, and they put the team logos next to one another, my wife’s first response was, “It even says ‘OW’ on the TV.”

Indeed it did. There it was in the Rose Bowl slot, Oregon versus Wisconsin. The yellow Autzen/Hayward O was situated immediately to the left of the red block W of the Badgers.

OW, indeed

For anyone who supports multiple college football teams, this is a rare occasion. Especially when those teams are scattered across three different time zones in three different conferences, the probability of dealing with split loyalties on the football field is rare.

Sometimes it does happen, though, where two teams square off and we are left to wonder about how to root. Oregon played Wyoming at Autzen Stadium when I was finishing my undergraduate work in Eugene, and that alone was a dilemma.

September 13 is here, and my conundrum commences. For the first time in history, Wyoming will play Oregon on the…

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The Ducks played a return game in Laramie three years later as I was wrapping up my Master’s degree at Oregon. I’ve never had to deal with the Badgers playing the Cowboys, as their last meetings occurred in 1985 and 1986 when I was still a toddler living in Wisconsin and before I knew anything about my future home state.

Oregon and Wisconsin, though… given the bowl affiliations that pair the Big Ten and Pac-12 against one another, there is always a risk that these two teams will be paired up. So far it has only happened twice to me since the Ducks became my alma mater. Both times, it happened in the Granddaddy of ’em All.

Remembering the 2012 Rose Bowl from a conflicted fan’s perspective

On New Year’s Eve 2011, as we headed toward the new year, my wife and I celebrated the 10th anniversary of our first date. Together from that point onward and married for more than three years at that point, she was well aware of my sports fanaticism and how an event thousands of miles away could impact the state of my emotions for hours, days, even a week or two.

The next day, we steeled our nerves and prepared for football games being played on Monday, January 2 to accommodate the Rose Bowl’s longstanding prohibition of playing games on Sunday.

She was not prepared for the 2012 Rose Bowl. I was not prepared for the 2012 Rose Bowl.

At the time I had not yet returned to college. Instead, I had been working for University of Oregon Catering as an employee of the institution for five years. I was about to leave that job to return to life as an academic, but I had lived in Eugene long enough — and married into a family of local Duck fanatics — that they had already indelibly printed themselves on to my fanatic’s consciousness.

We knew for a month that the Ducks and the Badgers would head to Pasadena to square off against one another for the oldest prize on the postseason slate. There were jokes over the course of December about wearing a modified jersey à la the Ray Bourque jerseys many a Bruins fan wore when he finally reached the Stanley Cup finals late in his career with the Colorado Avalanche.

Once the day approached, though, it became harder and harder to rectify my divergent rooting interests. Instead of enjoying a back-and-forth struggle that ended in a close 45-38 Ducks victory, I was wracked with uncertainty about how to respond to every play.

That made me a ton of fun to watch with, and my wife was wise to keep me from attending one of the watch parties around Eugene with friends whose loyalties were far less conflicted.

Everything that happened in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains on that Monday afternoon could realistically be construed as something to celebrate. Instead, every good thing that happened caused me to immediately reflect on the inverse bad that had happened to my other favorite team.

When Russell Wilson found Jared Abbrederis for a gorgeous 39-yard touchdown pass on Wisconsin’s opening drive of the game, all I could think about was that Ifo Ekpre-Olomu had just been torched in the secondary.

Later in the first quarter, De’Anthony Thomas ripped off a 91-yard touchdown for the longest scoring run in Rose Bowl history. My first thought was how badly the Badgers had been beaten at the point of attack.

Everything that happened in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains on that Monday afternoon could realistically be construed as something to celebrate for an individual who grew up rooting for Bucky Badger and who had been thoroughly indoctrinated in all things Duck. Instead, every good thing that happened caused me to immediately reflect on the inverse bad that had happened to my other favorite team.

The final result, with Darron Thomas leading a fourth-quarter comeback that allowed Oregon to snatch its first Rose Bowl victory since 1917, revealed the Rose Bowl to be one of the best games of the entire 2011-2012 bowl calendar. For someone whose loyalties rested with relatively equal weight on both sidelines, the result was at once wholly satisfying and wholly unsatisfying.

Darron Thomas became a Ducks legend, but that meant equally that Russell Wilson lost his final college game.

De’Anthony Thomas celebrated victory while Montee Ball pondered defeat.

Chip Kelly had a statement win after two years of heartbreak in the postseason. Bret Bielema never did win a Rose Bowl and left Madison the following season before taking a third stab at winning the big game…

I could on and on about the various individual dichotomies that went through my head that Monday sitting in front of the television at our place in Eugene.

This was the swirl in which I existed as a conflicted college football fan.

Cue eight years later, when I get to live it all over again.

Now I no longer live in Eugene. Instead I find myself on a different campus on the opposite side of the country, with a football program that nearly earned its way to the Rose Bowl this year.

As every fan who has ever had to watch two teams they love square off on a big stage, there is only so much satisfaction that can come from victory when there is also a defeat to be nursed.

Oh, how I wished at some level that the Nittany Lions had snagged the Rose Bowl berth as Ohio State’s replacement instead of Wisconsin. While I now attend school at Penn State, my Big Ten loyalties still lie squarely in Madison. A Penn State-Oregon Rose Bowl would not have wracked me the way another Badgers-Ducks duel inevitably will.

Either Justin Herbert or Jack Coan will leave the turf in Pasadena disappointed. The same holds true for CJ Verdell or Jonathan Taylor. Up and down the lines, both groups of young men will find a memory that will last a lifetime. Some will want to hold on to that memory, and some will be cursed with an inability to forget.

I am resolving this year to watch the Rose Bowl with a mindset to celebrate the good rather than dwelling on the negative counterpoint that comes with every big play. My wife, and our dog, will certainly appreciate the effort. We will see how long I am able to maintain that mindset once the opening kickoff flies over the hallowed turf and the game gets underway.

As every fan who has ever had to watch two teams they love square off on a big stage, there is only so much satisfaction that can come from victory when there is also a defeat to be nursed.