Thanks to the actions of the UW-Madison police at last Saturday's Badger football game, there's a new term fans can use to express disappointment or disapproval.
For instance, if football officials remove one of the nation's top programs (example: Virginia Tech) from the schedule and replace it with a lower-division cupcake (example: Cal Poly), season ticket holders - who receive no discount for the significant downgrade in value of their substantial purchase - can now say, "Man, we really got Tasered on that one!"
The impetus for this occurred shortly after kickoff at the Penn State game, when the cops Tasered longtime fan Margaret Hiebing, 54. Her crime was sitting in the aisle and objecting when officers attempted to escort her from the stadium. Hiebing was listed, along with her husband, Roman, in the "Coach's Club" section of the athletic department's 2006 and 2007 donor lists, which means they donated between $1,000 and $2,499 to the program in those years.
It's stuff like this, along with three straight losses and the aforementioned Cal Poly downgrade, that gets fans as angry as John McCain at a vegetarian potluck. Some go to extra lengths to vent - like UW-Madison law student Jeremy Lange, who started a blog called firebretbielema.com.
Lange registered the URL on Sunday, Oct. 5, the morning after the Badgers lost to Ohio State, 20-17, when a confused Wisconsin defense gave up a late touchdown and quarterback Allan Evridge responded by throwing an interception on the first play of the ensuing drive.
But even the most cynical and angry fans couldn't have predicted what would happen a week after that bitter loss. With Bielema's Badgers looking to salvage their spot among the Big Ten's elite programs, Penn State handed them a 48-7 beating, the program's worst loss at Camp Randall since 1989, when Miami came to town and won, 51-3. Losing by such a one-sided margin earned Bielema mentions this week in the same sentence as immortal losers like Don Morton and John Coatta.
Ouch.
Bitterness aside, Wisconsin fans are learning a hard lesson about college football hype. Like not trusting those talk-radio pundits who placed the Badgers among the national title contenders before they'd played a single down. The result was great expectations for Bielema, which he embraced.
It probably would have been smarter if Bielema had adopted the pose of Lou Holtz, who, while leading Notre Dame to the 1988 national championship, famously gave the Fighting Irish no chance against any of their opponents.
Some of the harshest criticism has been directed at senior Evridge, who entered the season relatively untested and who was yanked late in the third quarter of the Penn State game after completing just two of 10 passes for 50 yards. But fans should have seen this coming.
Last season, Evridge wasn't able to win the starting job from Tyler Donovan, a capable but limited athlete. News that Bielema wanted to reestablish the power running attack as the cornerstone of the offense this year should have been another sign that the coaches weren't enthusiastic about Evridge's throwing abilities. And injuries to tight ends Travis Beckum, a preseason All-American, and Garrett Graham denied Evridge two valuable weapons.
Fire Bielema? That's not likely to happen. But as has been made clear on Lange's site as well as numerous online message boards and talk-radio shows, Badger fans are ornery and losing patience. They're asked to pay for a top-tier program, but the last time Wisconsin won a Big Ten title and went to the Rose Bowl was in 1999.
If Bielema continues to pull good opponents off the schedule and lose big to the ones that remain, his boss might have to start taking the complaints seriously.