When the Wisconsin football team claimed a 17-0 season-opening victory over Miami (OH), it enabled Luke Fickell to check a notable item off his coaching career to-do list.
The win marked the first shutout for the Badgers in the 27-game Fickell Era.
Former UW coach and athletic director Barry Alvarez routinely spoke of the difficulty in keeping an opponent, regardless of pedigree, off the scoreboard. Even though he won three Big Ten Conference titles, three Rose Bowls and won nine of 13 bowls overall enroute to being inducted in the College Football Hall of Fame, he needed 46 games over five years before getting his first shutout during a 56-0 romp over Eastern Michigan to open the 1994 season.
In all, Alvarez finished with seven shutouts in 197 games before stepping down at the end of the 2005 season. His next two successors, Bret Bielema in 2006 and Gary Andersen in 2013, each had three shutouts in 92 and 26 games, respectively. Then Paul Chryst came along in 2015 and registered nine in 93 games, equaling the total of another UW football coach-turned-AD in Ivy Williamson, whose coaching tenure spanned 64 games from 1949 to ’55.
Harry Stuhldreher, yet another football coach-turned-director of athletics at Wisconsin, set the Associated Press poll era – which began in 1935 – record with 14 shutouts in 113 outings.
Three former UW coaches failed to register a shutout during their relatively brief coaching tenures: Don Morton worked 33 games from 1987 to ’89; Jim Hilles was in charge for 12 games in 1986 and John Coatta was on the sidelines for 30 games from 1967 to ’69.
When the current Badgers host Middle Tennessee (0-1) Saturday at 3 p.m. at Camp Randall Stadium, they’ll be looking for consecutive shutouts, which would match starts in 2019, 2013, 1958 and 1937.
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