Sixteen years earlier, a Wisconsin constituency justifiably hesitant about the state of the football program filled Camp Randall Stadium to roughly three-quarters of its capacity for Barry Alvarez’s debut. Still, the crowd of about 50,000 for that loss to California was measurably superior than any gathering for the latter days of Don Morton, give or take an urgent circus elephant.
If relative solitude was somehow craved by Bret Bielema for his first game as head coach of the Badgers, he could not have picked a better place. Cleveland Browns Stadium, to which Bowling Green had moved its home game, seemed as empty and soul-less as one might expect for a college game trying to fit itself into a pro venue.