2022 Badger Football Thread

GBP4EVER said:
Good Badgers can use him. Right now there is not much at the RB game and by time Fickell gets another RB in here ready Allen might go to pros after next year.
Click to expand...
Allen is not going pro after 2023 unless he has a Heisman type year. At best round 4 and no guarantee he makes a roster. Nice college back but don’t see how it translates to the next level
 
FlaPack said:
Click to expand...

Your thoughts on this kid? I know he's from down in your neck of the woods. He's a big one, that's for sure. If he can level some blocks and has decent hands, with a modicum of mobility.... who knows?

Question is really for Mark.
 
TW said:
Your thoughts on this kid? I know he's from down in your neck of the woods. He's a big one, that's for sure. If he can level some blocks and has decent hands, with a modicum of mobility.... who knows?

Question is really for Mark.
Click to expand...
More for Mark. He had an FSU visit earlier in December
 
Well, Blairsville is no FB powerhouse, talked to one of my nephews who went to Shorter with him. Bit of a diva. BB player as well as FB at Union county. More of a hybrid HB/TE type than a true TE but then again no idea what system they are plugging in yet. Just don't know if he fits maybe sh))
 
two other Badgers announced that they would not be back, and would instead move on to the NFL.

Redshirt junior Joe Tippmann and fifth-year senior Jay Shaw both took to social media to declare for the next level, and forgo the Guaranteed Rate Bowl.
 

How Wisconsin football and former quarterback Graham Mertz failed each other​

G
raham Mertz spent some of his final moments as the University of Wisconsin’s quarterback in pain on a knee on the sideline.
Mertz was injured after taking a hit to his left leg on the Badgers’ final drive against rival Minnesota on Nov. 26. Mertz appears when rewatching the television broadcast to be exhausted but trying to cheer on the offense’s last-ditch comeback effort. Mertz had to watch as that series reached the Gophers’ 5-yard line, but ended in embarrassing fashion as penalties pushed the Badgers back to the 30 and backup quarterback Chase Wolf’s attempts at the end zone came up empty.

The next step in Mertz’s college career seemed inevitable when UW athletic director Chris McIntosh pulled off the hire of Luke Fickell the following morning. Mertz entered the transfer portal Monday, ending a four-year stint in Madison that featured 32 starts and a 19-13 record. He completed 59.5% of his passes for 5,405 yards (159 per game) and 38 touchdowns with 26 interceptions.
Mertz’s tenure with the Badgers will go down as a disappointment. The former four-star recruit was the highest-rated quarterback prospect to choose UW out of high school, but Mertz never led the team to a Big Ten West Division title and twice had .500 or less records in conference play in three years as the starter.

Calling Mertz’s career a rollercoaster isn’t accurate. It was more like one of those giant-drop rides at the amusement park. The anticipation built as Mertz redshirted as a freshman, much like riders’ angst grows the higher they climb the drop tower. The ride and Mertz’s days as UW’s signal-caller officially began at their peaks, with that five-touchdown performance in his 2020 debut against Illinois inspiring so much hope. The bottom then dropped out, and there were brief shots back toward the top on the way down, but that high mark never was reached again.
So why didn’t it work? Why wasn’t Mertz, whose talent was sought by the likes of Nick Saban at Alabama, Dabo Swinney at Clemson and Urban Meyer at Ohio State, able to elevate the UW program and become the QB messiah fans dreamed about?

Responsibility for that lies both on Mertz and UW. Each party failed the other.

Schematic mismatch​

UW’s style of offense under former coach Paul Chryst, whom Mertz played all but seven of his games for, did not fit the strengths Mertz possessed out of high school.
That was somewhat intentional. Mertz wanted to learn a pro-style offense from one of the few Power Five programs running the scheme, and Chryst saw in Mertz an arm talent who could raise the bar on the passing attack.
But Mertz almost never took a snap under center during his prep career, and both sides underestimated how long it would take Mertz to master under-center footwork and technique.
The State Journal interviewed two private quarterback coaches during Mertz’s tenure, both of whom have had protégés land Division I scholarships and play in the NFL. Both requested anonymity so as not to affect their students’ potential to be recruited by UW.

Both coaches noted that Mertz lacked fundamentals when dropping back from under center, particularly in maintaining a strong throwing base on three-step drops. Those issues weren’t present when throwing from the shotgun, they said.
Mertz also struggled if he had to make multiple reads on play-action plays from under center, one QB coach said. Those plays require a quarterback to have his back toward the defense, which was new for Mertz at the college level.
Struggles in these areas — plus Mertz’s tendency to hang onto a play's first option, disrupting the timing of the other routes — led to some Mertz's ineffective play, one coach said.
Mertz did not respond to a social-media message asking to speak after his transfer announcement.
But Chryst and the UW coaching staff could have done more early in Mertz’s career to adapt the offense to his strengths, especially in 2020, Mertz’s first season as a starter during which COVID-19 limited in-person contact between coaches and the players. Mertz didn’t have a true offseason to continue homing those techniques after his freshman year, and UW didn’t do enough to accentuate his strengths.

UW’s fault​


Chryst and his staffs failed to get the most out of Mertz’s talents, and a few factors contributed to that failure.
UW changed Mertz’s quarterback coach three times during his career. Mertz had a different voice leading his meetings and drills each season as a starter. Mertz had Jon Budmayr coaching his room with Joe Rudolph as the offensive coordinator in 2020, then Chryst as his position coach and OC last season. Bobby Engram took over as coordinator and quarterbacks coach this offseason. Graduate assistant Keller Chryst, a former Stanford quarterback and Paul’s nephew, was also an integral voice in the QB room this season, and Mertz thanked him in a social-media post announcing his transfer.
“Zero chance at consistent success with that,” ESPN analyst and former NFL quarterback Dan Orlovsky said about Mertz’s revolving door of coaches. “It’s ridiculous. You just can’t play well in that world.”
During Paul Chryst’s year as Mertz’s QB coach, the ball essentially was taken out of Mertz’s hands and the Badgers ground out wins by leaning on the run game and defense. The lack of confidence shown in Mertz by the play-calling — Mertz averaged 17.3 passes per game in a seven-game win streak in 2021 — made things worse when UW needed the passing game to carry the load in a loss to Minnesota to end the regular season.
The supporting cast around Mertz wasn’t what was expected of UW, either. The offensive line has slipped from being a dominant group to just-above-average, particularly in pass blocking. UW finished ninth this season in the Big Ten in sacks allowed, sixth in QB hits allowed and fifth in total pressures allowed, according to PFF. The 2021 line led the Big Ten in fewest sacks allowed, aided by the dearth of passing attempts, but ranked eighth in quarterback hits allowed.
Click to expand...
A passer has a role in the line’s pass-blocking performance, and there were times that Mertz didn’t get the ball out on schedule or ran into sacks. But UW’s line for the most part wasn’t what Mertz signed up for, and the backslide of that group contributed to Mertz’s downfall.
UW never has been a destination for receivers out of high school, and while the hope was that playing with Mertz might change that outlook, it didn’t happen. Mertz threw to just two All-Big Ten pass-catchers: Tight end Jake Ferguson (first team, 2021) and receiver Chimere Dike (honorable mention, 2022). UW’s tight end group being decimated by injuries was bad luck for both the program and Mertz, and though young receivers like Skyler Bell showed high-level potential, the overall lack of depth at the skill positions hurt Mertz against better defenses.
Perhaps the Badgers’ biggest mistake was never finding Mertz a true competitor on the roster. Wolf is a year older than Mertz and was his backup until a knee injury in training camp cut short his senior season. Wolf would have days of practice in which he operated the first- or second-string offense more efficiently than Mertz did, but he made critical mistakes when put into games. Wolf had four interceptions in 24 pass attempts over six appearances before filling in for Mertz against Minnesota this season.
Recruits such as Deacon Hill had physical gifts but failed to put together things to become a true challenger to Mertz. Freshman Myles Burkett acted as the backup this season due to Wolf’s injury, but he took so few snaps during practices open to reporters this fall that it’s impossible to gauge from the outside how much he pushed Mertz.
Mertz’s starting spot was never in question from the moment he supplanted an injured Jack Coan as QB1 during training camp in 2020. The transfer portal could’ve been utilized to find a quarterback to do so, although landing a transfer signal-caller without the guarantee of a starting role is difficult.

Mertz’s missteps​

Mertz repeatedly made easily rectifiable mistakes independent of the coaching he received or the play of his teammates around him.
His ball-handling issues early in the 2021 season were a significant factor in the season-opening loss to Penn State, a defeat that cast doubt over Mertz the rest of the season and frankly the rest of his UW career. Mertz had nine fumbles and lost six of them in his first two seasons as a starter. To his credit, he cleaned up that significantly this season, fumbling just three times and losing one of them.
Poor ball-handling stems from lapses in focus, one of the QB coaches told the State Journal, because the technique is basic and doesn’t change much from the high school ranks to the college level.


Mertz’s decision-making was a consistent question mark during his UW tenure. He was too aggressive at certain points, like his pick-sixes in the fourth quarter of the Notre Dame game last season that ended the team’s chances to mount a comeback, or the interception he threw into the wind this season at Nebraska. The worst example was the interception he threw against Iowa this season that was returned for a touchdown. Mertz did a number of things well to step up and find a clean spot in the pocket, then inexplicably floated a pass to the flat in front of a defender. That touchdown gave Iowa the lead for good.
No amount of coaching can make up for a quarterback simply making the wrong decisions on the field. Coaches often commended Mertz’s study habits and work ethic, so knowing the correct reads or decisions on a play wasn’t often an issue. There were stretches in which Mertz got rolling and made throws few UW quarterbacks before him could, but those runs were dotted with mistakes previous Badgers QBs lived off never making.
New UW coach Luke Fickell likely will look for a different mold of quarterback than Mertz going forward because his offense operates best with a running threat under center. Fickell will have to recruit and develop physically-talented quarterbacks like Mertz to get the Badgers into true contention for Big Ten and College Football Playoff titles. UW will hope he’s able to support that talent better than the program did Mertz, and that future quarterbacks take the steps Mertz ultimately didn’t.
Click to expand...
 
  • Cheers
Reactions: TW
Pretty much sums up exactly what we've been talking about for quite some time.
 
247sports.com

Allen reinforces that he will remain with the Badgers during radio appearance

MADISON, Wis. — Braelon Allen already made it clear on Twitter earlier this week, but if anyone needed reassurance, he provided it Friday.During an appearance on 97.3
247sports.com 247sports.com
"I am a Badger," Allen said on Drew & KB. "I had a lot of people tell me, 'Welcome back.' I never left. I was always locked in here. Obviously, I was facing a weird situation during the season with rumors and things like that. But at the end of the day, I was always a Badger. As I have said multiple times, my main focus was the team and whoever we were playing that week to get that win. That was my main focus the whole time. It was a weird situation to be put in. You have to be careful with how you word things and what you're saying so that you're not giving people the wrong impression."
However, Allen did admit that the possibility of entering the transfer crossed his mind at one point amid the uncertainty of the coaching change.

"I can't say it didn’t cross my mind," Allen said. "I can't say that with all the uncertainty and question marks that I wasn't thinking about it for at least a split second. But I wasn’t going to force anything or rush anything.

"At the end of the day, I just feel like this is the best place for me. I came here for a reason. There are so many things I still want to do and accomplish in Madison and for this team. I couldn’t walk away from that."
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top