Badgers’ 2000 Rose Bowl win required a little extra motivation
October 08, 2019 | Football, Mike Lucas
Wisconsin’s back-to-back bowl victories anchored dream season
UWBadgers.com is looking back at Wisconsin Athletics' 1999-2000 season. Follow along throughout this year as we revisit this unheralded dream season for the Badgers.
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BY MIKE LUCAS
UWBadgers.com Senior Writer
MADISON, Wis. — Not that Barry Alvarez needed any help to prepare his team for the 1999 Rose Bowl, but he got an unexpected assist from CBS college football analyst Craig James, who blithely opined, "Wisconsin is the worst team ever to play in the Rose Bowl."
As a player, James made up one-half of SMU's fabled Pony Express with Eric Dickerson.
Badger fans could tell you which half of the horse he was.
But, then, nobody was taking Wisconsin seriously.
On a trip to Universal Studios, cornerback Jamar Fletcher listened in disbelief when a tour guide said, "We'd like to congratulate the two Rose Bowl teams. We have UCLA and the other guys."
During one of the media conferences leading up to the game, UCLA coach Bob Toledo mistakenly referred to Wisconsin defensive end Tom Burke as Tom Barnes.
Burke didn't respond directly to Toledo but vowed, "I'll talk with my pads."
That was the backdrop to what would be a "Captain Kirk" moment for Alvarez.
William Shatner was the grand marshal for the Tournament of Roses parade. At an event attended by both teams, Shatner got up and openly rooted for the Bruins to beat the Badgers.
Alvarez was ticked.
The next day at a luncheon, Shatner walked up to Alvarez and handed him an autographed picture. Alvarez never asked for one. So, he crumpled it up and threw it at Shatner's feet.
Despite all the public snubs, the underdog Badgers outlasted UCLA, 38-31, much to the delight of the 55,000 fans who were in Pasadena to see Ron Dayne rush for 246 yards and four touchdowns.
Alvarez was later asked about James' statement and he delivered a Hall of Fame response when he said, "I know there's at least one team worse than us" to have ever played in a Rose Bowl.
The Badgers didn't have that same psychological edge going into the 2000 Rose Bowl.
Stanford was a 14-point underdog, not Wisconsin. And being the favorite would be problematic.
"Coach Alvarez was good at getting us in the position where we were always playing with a little bit of a chip on our shoulder," said quarterback Brooks Bollinger. "Certainly, against UCLA that was easy to do and the planets aligned in such a perfect storm."
On top of lacking the proverbial "chip," there was a mental barrier for the returning players.
"It sounds silly to say because it is the Rose Bowl and it is the greatest place on earth and it is the 'Granddaddy of Them All,'" Bollinger said of the return trip to Pasadena, "but it was just more difficult to have the same edge that we had the year before.
"The hardest thing for me in preparation was that we had so much momentum that carried us through that whole run. Really from the second half of the Ohio State game (42 unanswered points all told) to the end of that year there was a tidal wave of emotion that we rode.
"Then all of a sudden, you have all this time to sit and think about it."
There's no question that the Badgers were playing their best football over the final six weeks of the regular season, all of which was capped in the home finale on November 13 with a rousing trouncing of Iowa during which Dayne became the NCAA's all-time leading rusher.
Alvarez knew that it would be hard to sustain that momentum over a long layoff. He purposely didn't scrimmage during the bowl practices to keep his key players healthy. He also knew that there wasn't as much urgency getting ready for No. 22-ranked Stanford as there was for No. 6 UCLA.
It had already been such a disjointed season for Alvarez, who was hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in early October with a serious knee infection that forced him to miss the Minnesota game. Upon returning, Alvarez was relegated to coaching from the press box and the Badgers went 7-0.
That was the plan for the Rose Bowl, too. Alvarez would be upstairs.
The night before the game, Alvarez was watching television when they broke in with a sports update. The local anchor reported that Stanford's two best players — wide receiver Troy Walters and defensive tackle Willie Howard — were expected to play against Wisconsin.
Earlier in the week, they had been ruled out of the game because of injuries.
Alvarez figured that Cardinal coach Tyrone Willingham was trying to get the upper hand in gamesmanship. "I decided right then," he said, "I'm going down on the sidelines."
He needed a cane, but he was not about to concede anything to Willingham. Besides, he preferred being on the sideline: "I like to see the guy's faces, I like to see their eyes."
Alvarez might have had second thoughts about his decision during a listless first half. Stanford came into the Rose Bowl with an aggressive defensive game plan and bottled up the Badgers.
"When you talk about a quarterback like Bollinger, you have to say to yourself, 'We have to contain him somehow,'" explained Cardinal linebacker Sharcus Steen. "He's a huge factor in their offense, almost as much as Dayne because he's mobile. He's just as dangerous as Dayne."
Stanford mirrored Bollinger on his bootlegs and limited Wisconsin's touches in a scoreless first quarter. The Cardinal had the ball for 9 minutes and 36 seconds (20 plays for 107 yards) while the Badgers had it for only 5:24 (nine plays for 12 yards). Plus, they were just out of sync and flat.
"We weren't playing well," Alvarez fumed. "Two times before when we came out here for the Rose Bowl ('94 and '98), we were big underdogs and our kids liked that. I liked that. This time we were the heavy favorites and we were sleepwalking."
That was never more evident than in the second quarter when the Badgers were guilty of a flurry of penalties that helped stake Stanford to a 9-3 first-half lead. Dayne was held to 46 yards. Alvarez was frustrated. Check that. Alvarez was furious with his players and their lack of focus.
"I had to get their attention," he said. "On my way into the locker room, my anger kept building. Normally as coaches, we go to a separate area and discuss any adjustments, that type of thing, and then we meet with our kids before going back on the field. That's what the players were used to."
Alvarez elected to throw a fit — and everyone a curve ball with his actions.
"I went straight to the players in the locker room," he said. "There was a plastic trash barrel and I grabbed the metal cane like it was a baseball bat and I hit that thing so hard that it sounded like a bomb went off in there. The players were shocked and then I started into a tirade."
In so many words, Alvarez told them that they had been reading their press clippings and they were going through the motions. Something like that. Asked to be more precise, he confided, "I told them that they needed to get their heads out of their fannies, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera."
Bollinger came up behind Alvarez when he swung at the barrel.
"I can remember that pretty vividly," he said, adding that the Alvarez diatribe was also pretty memorable. "With Coach, his voice gets higher pitched the angrier he is. When he was talking to us, I'd say that he was at his highest octave that he had at the time."
How out of character was that for Alvarez?
"One of his greatest strengths as a leader was the ability to instill confidence in people around him," Bollinger said. "He can make you feel like you can take on the world. But he didn't lose his composure very often. He had people on his staff to do that for him. He was very even-keeled."
Alvarez didn't have to wait long for the desired reaction. On the second play of the third quarter, Dayne snapped the Badgers out of their lethargy and completely reversed the momentum. Bursting through a gaping hole, he rambled 64 yards to the Stanford 11.
"I just saw a hole," Dayne said matter of factly, "and I ran through it."
Following blocks from center Casey Rabach and fullback Chad Kuhns to the second level, he then deftly set up downfield blocks by wide receivers Chris Chambers and Nick Davis.
"That's what our team is all about — we're going to run it down your throat," said UW defensive tackle Wendell Bryant. "And that's what we started to do in the second half."
Referencing Alvarez's fire-and-brimstone, Dayne sarcastically added, "We had a nice talk, a nice little calm talk at halftime and everybody got real motivated. We went out and did what we had to do."
Singling out the 64-yard burst, Alvarez said, "It flipped how we were playing. All of a sudden, boom, we got him in the open and that seemed to get everyone's mojo going."
Bollinger expected no less out of Dayne.
"You knew it was going to happen at some point — at least you fully expected it to happen, at least I did," Bollinger said. "It wasn't happening, it wasn't happening. And, then, it happened. And everybody was like, 'OK, here we go.' Everything was right with the world."
Two plays later, Dayne scored, Vitaly Pisetsky kicked the PAT and the Badgers took a 10-9 lead that they later extended in the fourth quarter thanks to a clutch naked bootleg pass from Bollinger to tight end John Sigmund on a fourth-and-2 play from the Stanford 32.
Sigmund picked up seven yards and kept alive a drive that would culminate with a Bollinger sneak for a touchdown, sealing the 17-9 win and securing Wisconsin's place in history as the first Big Ten program to capture back-to-back Rose Bowls.
After rushing 34 times for 200 yards, Dayne was selected as the game's MVP for the second straight year, joining Washington quarterback Bob Schloredt (1960-61) and USC tailback Charles White (1979-80) as the only back-to-back winners of the award.
Dayne's final run as a Badger covered six yards. He was stopped on the 33. Poetic justice for No. 33, who finished his four-year career with 7,125 rushing yards, 71 touchdowns and the Heisman Trophy.
Addressing a third Rose Bowl win, Dayne and the historic season, Alvarez said, "There's nothing like doing something that no one else has done. You don't get many opportunities like that in a lifetime."
