“The ultimate hire”

Legendary coach Barry Alvarez looks back on 25 years at UW

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Barry Alvarez will never forget his first day as the University of Wisconsin’s new head football coach in 1990.

“I walked into the football offices and there were two secretaries sitting there smoking, in sweatshirts and jeans,” Alvarez recently recalled from his office overlooking Camp Randall Stadium in Kellner Hall, a building that didn’t even exist in 1990. “I thought, ‘This isn’t going to work.’ It was run like a bad high school program. There were no standards for anything.”

The Badgers were good enough to earn trips to some minor bowl games in the early ’80s, but the 1986 death of head coach Dave McClain during a spring practice shocked the program and drove it to the brink of destruction.

How bad was it before Alvarez? Under two different head coaches — Jim Hilles and Don Morton — Wisconsin went 9-36 between 1986 and 1989. Camp Randall was half full on Saturdays, the athletic department was $2 million in debt, the guy in charge of video for the team also was the equipment manager, and players were embarrassed to wear their letter jackets in public. 

“It was a mom-and-pop shop,” says Andy Baggot, a veteran sportswriter who covered Badgers football and the athletic department for decades for the Wisconsin State Journal and now writes for UWBadgers.com. He cites the triumvirate of Alvarez, former athletic director Pat Richter and former chancellor Donna Shalala for making sports a priority again at the university. “They had to take an operation from ground zero in terms of expectations and run it the way they thought it should be run. Barry Alvarez was a big part of a getting things moving in the right direction.”

What if, 25 years ago, Alvarez — an assistant at Notre Dame under head coach Lou Holtz at the time who never even visited the UW campus before taking the job — hadn’t accepted Richter’s offer? What if the athletic director instead hired West Virginia University’s Don Nehlen, who had two decades of head coaching experience?

Richter did reach out to Nehlen, right after West Virginia lost the 1989 Gator Bowl. But Nehlen was in no mood to discuss an invitation from Richter to visit Madison.

“I called Don after the bowl game, and he wasn’t very cranked up,” Richter, now 74 and retired, says. “He wanted to think about things for a day or two. When he said that, I decided that I was going to go with Barry, because we needed somebody who was cranked up and ready to go. Barry had every motivation to succeed.”

Alvarez was cranked up, all right.

Despite a 1-10 season in 1990, Alvarez became the winningest football coach in UW history (118-73-4), went 8-3 in bowl games, coached three Big Ten and three Rose Bowl championship teams and is the only Big Ten coach to win back-to-back Rose Bowls. He also guided Wisconsin to consecutive Big Ten titles for the first time in more than 100 years — transforming not only the university’s football program but its entire athletic culture. National Football League teams drafted 59 former Badgers, including nine in the first round.

Alvarez split his time as both head football coach and athletic director for two years beginning in 2004 after Richter retired. Since 2006 he’s  been the AD exclusively, overseeing 23 sports and 900 student-athletes. During that time the Badgers have won a combined 14 national team titles, and more than 1,000 student-athletes have earned Academic All-Big Ten honors. Some people on Alvarez’s staff today weren’t even born when he arrived on campus in 1990.

Through it all, he turned down opportunities to coach in the NFL and at other universities. “Barry was the ultimate hire,” Baggot says. “But to think he would be here 25 years later? I never saw that.”

“This wasn’t a stepping stone,” Alvarez says. “I came here to build a program, and I thought I had a really good plan.”

Hard to believe that 25 years have passed since an admittedly cocky 43-year-old took the podium at his introductory press conference in early 1990 and declared that fans “better get their season tickets right now, because before long, they probably won’t be able to.”

“At that time, I was hot,” says Alvarez, now 68. “We’d won a national championship at Notre Dame, we were undefeated until the last game of the season [in 1989], when we lost to Miami, and whenever there was an opening at a school, somebody contacted me.”

Alvarez, a former linebacker at the University of Nebraska, also has worked as an assistant coach at the University of Iowa. Throughout his career at Wisconsin, Alvarez has cited as his mentors the legendary men who were longtime head coaches at those universities — Nebraska’s Bob Devaney and Iowa’s Hayden Fry, as well as Notre Dame’s Lou Holtz.

Alvarez knew what success felt and tasted like, and he was familiar enough with the Big Ten to implement his “really good plan.”

“The first thing I had to do was win over the high school coaches, and I started meeting with them immediately,” Alvarez says. “At my first press conference, I said I was going to build a wall around this state and not allow the good players to leave. One of my goals was to help coaches improve high school football, because the better they were, the better I’d be.”

He also had to deal with the 2-9 team he inherited after Morton was fired. “The kids knew they couldn’t compete in the Big Ten, but they came, because most of them were recruited here,” Alvarez says, adding that more than 50 players quit on him. “And not one of them did I miss.”

Discipline problems ran rampant, especially with drugs, and he held players accountable. “I said, ‘Listen, I’ll give you a chance, but I’m going to test your ass every week. You test positive, you’re gone,’” Alvarez says. “So a couple guys eliminated themselves that way. They thought I was trying to run them off. I was just trying to make them better.”

Despite the challenges, Alvarez says he knew things were starting to turn around, oddly enough, during a loss at Michigan State in the final game of that first season.

“We went up there with one win, and our guys played their hearts out. We were inside the 10-yard line and threw a good play-action pass. Tony Spaeth tries to cradle the ball and it goes through his arms,” Alvarez recalls, as if the game happened last week, not almost 25 years ago to the day. “We lose, 14-9. Should’ve won. But our guys didn’t quit, even though they weren’t playing for anything — just pride.”

When the 1993 Badgers won Wisconsin’s first-ever Rose Bowl, Alvarez bought watches for the seniors on that 1990 team because “they were part of building the foundation.” (For more about the 1993 Rose Bowl, see sidebar.)

In 1996, running back Ron Dayne arrived on the scene, marking what Alvarez calls a turning point for Wisconsin, which was evolving into one of the country’s elite college football programs. “We couldn’t imagine that a freshman was going to be our offense, but that’s what happened,” Alvarez says. “When anybody thinks of Wisconsin today, they think of us handing the ball off and Dayne running the football. We threw the ball a lot and had some good receivers come through here. But everybody thinks all we did was hand the ball off. That year, that is all we did.”

The Badgers went on to win both the 1999 and 2000 Rose Bowls, arguably the pinnacle of the Alvarez era. Then, in the summer of 2000, came the Shoe Box scandal — an episode that Alvarez to this day considers the most disappointing chapter of his career.

The university suspended 26 football players for receiving discounts from the Black Earth shoe store. More penalties were to come, including being placed on probation for five years by the NCAA and the loss of some football and basketball scholarships.

“We got ambushed, and I thought it was totally botched by our administration,” Alvarez says emphatically. “I don’t think our administration knew how to handle it. We were the only team to ever win back-to-back Rose Bowls, let alone win three, and I felt like our own people sabotaged us.”

Alvarez maintains that university officials could have built a case that proved members of any team — and not just UW teams — could receive discounts at the store.

“The athletic department didn’t really have any say in it,” Richter says today, agreeing with Alvarez’s assessment. “I think there could have been more work done in the chancellor’s office and legal offices to find other situations that were similar to ours. We could have said, ‘Hey, this student got the same discount that our people did.’ Given what’s happened [in college sports] since that time, the whole thing looks more ridiculous now than it did back then.”

Barry Alvarez has encountered his share of detractors over the years. Most recently, some critics have questioned his leadership after Wisconsin’s two most recent head football coaches, Bret Bielema and Gary Andersen, each abruptly quit before bowl games.

Alvarez says it would be impossible in his position not to ruffle some feathers. “There are so many things that can go wrong, so many ways you can offend people, so many ways that the bottom could fall out of the program, ways that you could go on probation, ways that you could have issues with compliance,” Alvarez says. “Just keeping your arms around everything and keeping people happy is difficult.”

College sports today looks nothing like it did in 1990, and that makes Alvarez’s job even tougher, especially when it comes to managing the athletic department’s $113 million budget.

The university is still expected to subsidize 23 sports despite increased expenses that include soaring salaries. As head football coach, Alvarez earned $135,000 in 1990; first-year Badgers head football coach Paul Chryst will make $2.3 million this year, and men’s head basketball coach Bo Ryan will earn close to $3 million. In 2007, anticipating an economic recession, Alvarez asked all sports to cut their budgets by 5%, “which allowed us to sustain our programs.”

“Football’s the train that drives it all,” he says, turning his head toward Camp Randall’s playing field and explaining that two-thirds of the money UW athletics generates comes from its football program. “As long as we can keep this stadium full, we can keep all 23 sports competing at a high level. Right now, we’re not in danger of losing sports. We’re in pretty good shape, and we’re one of the few schools that have sports pay for themselves.”

Alvarez has attempted to make life a little better for Wisconsin student-athletes, too, especially the ones who don’t play football. But he does not think paying athletes is the way to go. “I’m not for pay-to-play, but you have to allow them to live,” Alvarez says.

As part of his effort to improve the athletic experience on campus — and because he made good on his day one prediction that Camp Randall would be consistently packed — Alvarez has supported and overseen the building of several new athletic facilities, including the Kohl Center, LaBahn Arena, the Robert and Irwin Goodman Softball Complex, University Ridge and the Fetzer Student-Athlete Academic Centers.

Alvarez can be seen at those facilities, too: One recent weekend, he made appearances at football, men’s and women’s soccer, volleyball and fall softball games.

“We didn’t do anything for football for years,” he says. “Then we lost a couple [recruits] because of facilities, and I knew we had to do something.”

Alvarez plans to improve the exterior of the UW Field House by replacing the old windows and making the corridor at the south end of Camp Randall Stadium as attractive as the north end. Improvements to the stadium’s press box and the addition of more premium seating also are on his to-do list.

With four more years left on his contract (along with a possible fifth, he adds), Alvarez likely will have time to spearhead those projects and more. He also is a member of the College Football Playoff Selection Committee.

“I like the energy of the college environment,” he says. “As long as my health is good and I enjoy what I’m doing — and the people that I answer to think I’m doing a good job — I’m not ready to slide into Florida just yet.”

And when he finally does retire?

Alvarez smiles: “I know the program’s going to be a hell of a lot better than when I showed up.”

Mark Tauscher and Barry Alvarez talk ’93 Rose Bowl

Growing up in the 1980s in Wisconsin, I did not dream of going to play football for Bucky. But after watching Wisconsin beat Michigan State in the last-ever Coca-Cola Classic in Tokyo in 1993 — a victory that sent UW to its first Rose Bowl since 1963 — I knew I wanted to wear the red and white. Seven years later, I was a starter in the 2000 Rose Bowl game against Stanford, and Barry Alvarez was my coach. During a recent interview with Alvarez, I asked him about preparing for a game halfway across the world, as well as his Rose Bowl memories. Here’s an edited version of our conversation. 

Mark Tauscher: What sticks out the most in your mind about that first Rose Bowl experience?

Barry Alvarez: Just how excited everyone in this state was. It was like no one could believe we were going to the Rose Bowl. Other than myself and my staff, there wasn’t a person in this athletic department who had ever been to a bowl game. But our kids weren’t overwhelmed by it.

Why not?

I think they were prepared. They were very confident. They were tough-minded. To go to the Rose Bowl and win that first time is really hard.

I’ve never really heard a lot of stories about the trip over to Japan in 1993. There have to be some fun, behind-the-scenes stories about that.

The NCAA was taking two schools a year over there, and it was hard to find somebody to give up a home game. It was summer of 1992, and the game against Michigan State was going to be our last game of the year — and we had an open date before it. I’m looking for an edge to win the game. It would be a hell of a reward for the kids. It would be like a bowl game. So I called [then MSU head coach George] Pearles and said, “Would you be interested in playing in Japan?”

I got ahold of the people on campus who work with astronauts, and they told me you can knock your body clock back two hours a day by using light and dark. So I bought all the players sunglasses and told them when to wear them during the day. We practiced two hours later than usual, we stayed up two hours later, we slept two hours later. We did that for a week.

The day before we went to Chicago to fly to Tokyo, we practiced from 9 at night to 11, and then went to a midnight movie. We drove to Chicago and got there about 4 in the morning, and I let them sleep until noon.

Then we got on a plane with Michigan State but told our guys they couldn’t sleep. Michigan State didn’t know anything about it. They’re all beat up because they just played the night before. We were better than them anyhow, but we had every advantage in the world. And we beat the hell out of them. [Final score: 41-20.]

Looking back at the introductory press conference in 1990, what would you tell that Barry Alvarez today?

I’d tell him, “I’m glad you’re so damn naïve that you can sit up here and spout off like you are.” I was just so confident.