Ultimate Sports Weekend in Madison

This past weekend in Madison was one of the best weekends for sports in recent memory. Starting on friday with the hockey series against # 3 North Dakota was great as the badgers skated to a 4-0 shutout over the Fighting Sioux. Shane Connolly made over 40 saves to preserve the shutout and give the Badgers a great win.
Saturday morning was a real early start, as parents weekend tailgates combined with the 11 am starting time of the football game made it a tough start to the day after Friday night. However, it was easy to get up for the game as the Michigan fans were trash talking a lot in the bars the previous night and everyone wanted to really kick their asses. Anyways, the game was great as the badgers played possibly their best game of the year and extended their home win streak to 14 games.
Although the hockey team lost saturday night, the bars were all packed with lots of great trash talking to the wolverine fans. Sunday, the Badger basketball team got off to a good start with a 30 point victory to kick off the season. All in all , a great badger sports weekend

Badgers/Buckeyes

For a few brief minutes, last Saturday, Madison, Wisconsin was the center of the sports universe. Halfway into the third quarter, the lowly Badgers, already coming into Columbus, Ohio with two unexpected losses, were leading the number one ranked Buckeyes, in their home stadium known as the Horseshoe. It was a surreal scene in Madison that Saturday morning. The game was televised on the Big Ten Network, a station that is not carried by the Charter cable company, allowing only those viewers who had subscribed to DirecTV to be allowed to watch the game in the comfort of their own home.
In response to this change, thousands of people flocked to sports bars at 11 in the morning in order to watch the game. Never have I seen State Street Brats so crowded. It was impossible to find a seat upstairs in order to watch the game on the two big screens, so I headed outside, although it was a little cold at first. Nonetheless, the patio outside was still crowded and whenever the Badgers were driving and in scoring position, an even larger crowd would begin to gather outside the gates of Brats in order to look in on the TVs.
However, the glory of beating the top ranked team faded fast, as the Buckeyes finally found their groove and scored 28 straight points on their way to what ended up being a convincing victory. The Badgers are now left with three conference losses, an extreme disapointment, and yet another tough matchup this weekend with the Wolverines of Ann Arbor coming into Camp Randall. Hopefully, the Red Sea will be enough to help the badgers beat Michigan at home, just like it did in an upset two years ago.

Champaign is No Madison

This past weekend I traveled four hours to the south in hope of a great weekend of partying, friends, and most importantly beating the Illini in football. The Badgers were undefeated, ranked 5 in the nation and hadn't lost in fourteen games, yet for some reason, were underdogs to Illinois, a team that had won a total of 4 games in the past two seasons. It was a perfect morning for football, sunny, maybe a little hot, but everyone was ready for the first big game in Champaign in a long time. Before the game about 20 of us were grilling, drinking and mostly yelling at everyone dressed in orange that would pass by.
Eventually, it was time to go into the game, and as we settled into our seats next to the Wisconsin section of the upper deck, we realized something was missing: no one was talking shit to us. We were dressed in red from head to toe, and yelling at the Badgers' every movement, yet none of the Illinois fans around us were saying anything. However, as the game went on, we were not as happy as we were when we walking in the stadium. The Illini knocked off the Badgers, who played a game full of terrible mistakes.
The rest of the day was not as fun as it should be, however we made up for it by rallying with a great night out in Champaign. The one problem though that still occured that night was that we still didn't hear anything at the bars that night wearing our Wisconsin gear. Not even a couple drinks could bring out some taunting out of the Illini fans. In Madison, if the tables were turned, the Illini fans would be yelled at with chants of asshole the entire night. This is why Madison is Madison and Champaign never will be.