Mike Tressel gave Wisconsin exactly the kind of defensive performance that turns heads, and he did it in the same week two former Badgers defensive coordinators were shown the door as head coaches.
On Saturday against USC, Tressel’s unit put together a clinic. If not for a referee seeking out contact on the sideline, the Badgers might have finished with a shutout.
That would have been the first shutout ever of a Lincoln Riley-coached team. Even with USC getting to seven points, that still marked a career low for a Riley offense.
Wisconsin got the job done, and USC’s rush attack was bottled up to negative 17 yards.
That performance was enough to earn Tressel recognition from CBS Sports as its defensive coordinator of the week. It also came at a strange moment for Wisconsin football, because two of the program’s former defensive coordinators were fired as head coaches over the weekend.
The first was Dave Doeren, who had been at NC State since 2013. The Wolfpack decided they had seen enough after a 3-4 start and a 1-3 mark in conference play.
Doeren, who left Wisconsin to become the head coach at Northern Illinois before later moving on to NC State, never quite pushed the program beyond the same general range of seven to nine wins a year. The conference totals never really broke through either, and NC State still owes him around $10 million.
The second was Dave Aranda at Baylor. Aranda was the defensive coordinator at Wisconsin from 2013 to 2015 before leaving for LSU and eventually landing the Baylor job.
He became a major coaching name in 2021 after turning a 2-win team into a 12-win one, but that peak turned out to be the outlier. Baylor’s seasons after that went 6-7, 3-9, 8-5, 5-7, and then 4-3 before the school fired him.
Baylor still owes him $12 million.
For Wisconsin, the contrast was hard to miss. Two former defensive masterminds lost their jobs in the same weekend, while Tressel’s defense was stealing the spotlight. If anything, it was a reminder that sometimes the best move is just keeping your footing where you are.
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Wisconsin Just Made A Statement USC Fans Wont Forget
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The numbers tell the story even before the final score does. USC managed just seven points, the fewest ever by a Lincoln Riley-coached team, and the Trojans finished with minus-17 rushing yards in one of those old-school Big Ten outings Wisconsin seems to specialize in when it gets rolling. For a program trying to reestablish itself on the national stage, this was the kind of statement win that resonates well beyond one Saturday night. [Read more 🡒]