Have a heart for Luke Fickell

Ever have to face the music in public?

Probably ought not to expend our thimbleful of empathy for a football coach. We switch channels when encountering those appeals to rescue shivering dogs. Still, we feel the discomfort of taking the hot seat at the post-game press conference after being humbled 44 to 25 by a Nebraska team that was itself reeling. 

Did we expect too much from Luke Fickell? Too soon? A college football coach right out of central casting (now THERE is an outdated cliché!), a hot number after taking a mid-major program to the college playoffs. Taking over a moribund program from the charisma-deprived Paul Chryst, the new UW Badger coach promised an exciting-sounding scheme called the Air Raid offense. Hired two years ago this month, the Air Raid has run aground.

Shedding offensive coordinator Phil Longo is like throwing off cargo to keep a leaky ship afloat. Firing underlings is the laetrile of a losing program.

After 22-straight years of post-season appearances. the Wisconsin Badgers might not qualify for the mayonnaise bowl!

 Don’t piss off your beat reporters!

So the trick is to sound contrite but hopeful, angry yet conciliatory. Don’t do a Nixon, don’t be maudlin, don’t whine that nobody ever wrote a book about your mother. Going all Trumpy won’t work either; blaming the fake news media won’t bring Braelon Allen back to Camp Randall. Blaming the referees like that Chicago Bears coach doesn’t move the scoreboard. (Credit Coach Fickell, he has not.)

One could try echoing Rudy Giuliani after 9/11 and deliver the brutal truth: “The number of losses will be more than any of us can bear ultimately. And I don’t think we want to speculate on the number of defeats that lie ahead.”

Fickell could go all Churchill: “We shall defend our end zone, whatever the cost may be. We shall recruit in the projects, we shall invade the portal, we shall pay college kids for their image and likeness, we shall never join the Mid-American Conference.”

There’s always Jim Mora: “Playoffs? PLAYOFFS?”

 Our own war story

Tommy Thompson departed for a cabinet position in Dubya’s administration, leaving the state treasury depleted. The WI Department of Revenue, therefore, attempted to pinch pennies by deploying its regular staff, rather than hire temps, to process the annual income tax haul. This afforded its spokesman, a certain future bloggeur, the opportunity to plug electronic filing so taxpayers could bypass the not-ready for primetime players. 

Blaska went the extra step of assuring the public that anyone reasonably compos mentis could process tax returns, if they were handy with a letter opener. However the tax paying public may have been calmed, the departmental spokesguy enraged another audience, that being the full-time employees in tax processing on the floor below. Hundreds of them, lighting up the in-house e-mail with pitchforks and torches.

Revenue Secretary Rick Chandler forced the transgressor to perform an abject, penitential crawl before multiple assemblages of offended tax processors. (Unlike Tammy Faye, we could not turn on the tear sprinklers.) Followed up with a TV news stand-up equating tax processing with astrophysics. It had to be done, or get thrown over the side like Phil Longo.

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Given that the college football championship now encompasses 12 teams, anyone else think the Big Ten conference championship has become the equivalent of the NFL’s all-pro game? 

In other words, a damned nuisance?