FamILLy Ties

It has taken me 48 hours to form this article in my head. It's one of those posts that has a maybe 25% chance of coming out like I'm hoping it will. I'll have to walk the thin line between observer and fanboy and I'm not sure I can pull it off. Can anyone?

I heard Ben Thompson (Stratechery) say once that when someone compliments him on an article he wrote by saying something like "how long did it take you to write that?", he responds with "for every article I write I have the sense that I've been writing it for years." That's how I feel with this one. I'm trying to condense all of my observations of the Bret Bielema era into one article.

And I need to start by saying that I'm not writing this from an "everything is fixed!" perspective. It's probably fixed, but there are still hurdles ahead. We graduate 15 starters after the 2025 season. 2026 will be "let's see how Bret Bielema handles a true rebuilding year". Even Barry Alvarez, when he rebuilt Wisconsin from the ground up, won 10 games in 1993 (his fourth season), had a fair bit coming back for 1994 and won 8 games, and then graduated most of his starters and dropped back to 4 wins in his sixth season. After that final rebuilding year in 1995, Alvarez then went to a bowl 9 of the next 10 seasons before he retired and handed his program to one Bret Bielema.