NCAA Football wisconsin Badgers

Barry Alvarez (pictured right), the former head football coach and current athletic director at the University of Wisconsin, is definitely a glass-half-full guy. Most athletic directors would be sweating if their season ticket renewals fell from 99% of current ticket holders to 94% in a single season, which is what has happened, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.

From the outside it might seem like the football team's recent squishiness might have something to do with this sudden dropoff in renewals. The Badgers have stepped back a bit every year under head coach Bret Bielema, with last year's squad barely breaking .500 and getting stomped flat by a toothless Florida State team, 42-13, in the Champs Sports Bowl.

Nope, says Alvarez. Taking a page from Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign manual, he says it's the economy, stupid. That's why more than 3,000 season ticket holders aren't going to re-up to watch the 2009 Badgers.

It's not just a Wisconsin thing. Numerous football programs from BCS conferences have made a bad habit of scheduling cupcakes in recent years. Of course, Wisconsin has been as bad an offender as anyone. They play a Division I-AA (er, FCS) team every season, and sometimes they manage to almost lose.

Former football coach and current athletic director Barry Alvarez seems hell-bent on changing the perception that Wisconsin doesn't play anyone outside of the Big Ten schedule.

As Mark Hasty mentioned Friday, there is much pressure on the Wisconsin Badgers football team this fall. After a disappointing season a year ago, the heat is on to prove it was nothing but a fluke.

To do so, Wisconsin will rely, in large part, on a "new" starting offensive backfield in 2009. 2008's starting running back, P.J. Hill, is gone. Also gone is the guy who started the season as the top quarterback, Allan Evridge.

It's barely spring here in the Midwest but spring football is well under way, and there's abundant intrigue in the Big Ten conference. Coming off what seems like the 46th consecutive disappointing bowl season, including a Rose Bowl where Penn State's Daryll Clark (right) did his best but the Nittany Lions still couldn't beat Southern Cal, nobody will be expecting much from the conference or its teams when fall rolls around. Somebody has to win it, however, and now is when the jockeying for position really begins.

Much like Congress, University of Wisconsin football players are alleged to have mis-appropriated funds intended to assist them with housing and food. Some are alleged to have diverted some of their housing stipends to other purchases, particularly moped bikes and other vehicles. Apparently Madison has a spate of very large men riding around on very small bikes down its streets like a scene out of the narrow corridors of some remote Italian villas.

Notably, senior linebacker Jonathan Casillas explained to WKOW news how the practice worked. "Once you get to your second, third year, you start learning what's cheap (housing), what's expensive. Maybe live with somebody and split the rent. And hopefully you can get a moped, or maybe even a car. Some people got cars." The reported monthy stipend at Wisconsin averaged out to $1,009 a month.

As hundreds of young athletes continue their preparations for next month's NFL Draft, it's inevitable that at least a few of them will run afoul of the law. For them, the draft will become a bit more stressful, as they take quite a hit in the wallet while they plummet down the board.

This year, former Wisconsin running back P.J. Hill now finds himself in that predicament. Hill was arrested early Saturday morning in Madison for drunken driving. While he wasn't exactly flying up draft boards and appeared a bit slow at his Pro Day, what's left of Hill's stock is sure to start falling now.

Ah, March, that time of year when various people you've never heard of pop up on your radar screen solely to inform you they no longer exist as entities that you had little chance of knowing even existed in the first place. Case in point:

Signing day has come and (nearly) gone, filled with celebration and upheaval. Sort of like life. We're here to parse what can be parsed and detail the recruiting classes that were for the major conferences.

While recruiting services Scout and Rivals differ widely in their overall assessments of this year's Big Ten recruiting classes, they're both impressed by many of the same things. Of course, they're also unimpressed by many of the same things.

But hey, you're a smart person. You can figure things out for yourself. You want to know who helped themselves. You want to know who shot themselves in the foot. You want to know if the talent-rich got richer, like Michigan did with defensive end Craig Roh (pictured). Make the jump, grasshopper; all will be revealed.

Whenever you are dealing with young kids, you're going to experience some difficulties in decision-making. Plenty of adults have issues with commitment, so kids are bound to have the occasional change of heart. I've never thought it was a terribly big deal when it happened, but it seems to be grounds for assault when a teenage athlete changes his/her mind on a college choice. One of those who has made that change on Signing Day is Kraig Appleton, a wide receiver from East St. Louis, Illinois. YouTube of his skillz is after the jump.

In the first installment of the end-of-season report card on the Big Ten, we looked at the schools in the first half of the alphabet. Know what letter is in the first half of the alphabet? That's right. F. But then, all the other grade letters are in the first half of the alphabet too.

Even though it wasn't a great year overall for the conference, there were plenty of bright points and hopeful signs and "wait until next year" moments which should have Big Ten fans excited for next season. Either that, or we'll all look like Charlie Brown did five seconds after Lucy teed up the football. But I digress. Let's take a look at the teams in the second drawer of the Big Ten file cabinet, shall we?