This is an opinion column.
No bowl outside of Berkley was packed tighter than Camp Randall Stadium.
It was 1:41 p.m. in Madison and vibes, as the students would say, were immaculate. The time had come to celebrate early 90s Irish-American hip hop in what’s become a sacred ritual for the football gods of the dairy lands.
So they jumped up. They got down.
And then they got the hell out of there.
By 1:46 p.m., that previously jammed Wisconsin student section was a concrete wasteland — a tribute to the scoreboard Alabama had already wrecked.
The Crimson Tide would add another touchdown to punctuate the 42-10 statement that was made a little more than an hour earlier.
Make no mistake about it, Camp Randall was a tumbleweed town late because of what Alabama did as the first half ended and the second half began. Leading 14-3 while holding a meek 151-141 yardage edge, Alabama got the ball with 36 seconds on the second-quarter clock.
A 10-play, 57-yard Wisconsin drive had just ended with a duffed field goal that would’ve made it a one-score game. Alabama felt to be reasonably in control, but that wasn’t their objective a week after playing 3.5 relatively demure quarters of football.
Then something snapped.
The message was clear after the Alabama offense trotted out 36 ticks before intermission. There would be no knee, no baffling clock management and no mercy.
A 47-yard shot from Jalen Milroe to Alabama’s teen star Ryan Williams was Part I.
Alabama grabbed the shovel with the 26-yard flick to Germie Bernard seconds later. Touchdown.
And they swung it five plays into the second half.
Jam Miller’s 34-yard run through the guts of an overmatched Badger defense made it Alabama 28, Wisconsin 3.
Pack it up.
Pack it in.
The two-play, 73-yard sprint required just 17 second-quarter seconds as Milroe came to drop bombs. That, paired with the five-play, 75-yard, 2:20 relative odyssey to open the third was enough to bury the Badgers.
All there was left to do was hop around.
Then retreat to the safety of Madison’s legendary tap rooms because Alabama showed no interest in playing before anyone but its version of red after the hopping ceased.
Though against the Big Ten’s next tier, Alabama flashed its danger within the SEC with its final non-con test before No. 1 Georgia visits in two weeks.
It cleaned up the spilled milk from last week’s South Florida flop and carried momentum into the biggest game on the calendar.
Alabama decided to protect Milroe, the ball and its fans sanity with brutal efficiency.
A week after committing 13 sloppy penalties, it was flagged just four times Saturday.
Where it lost three fumbles to South Florida, it snatched two from the Badgers.
Both came deep in Wisconsin territory and Milroe’s group wasted little time making Wisconsin pay. Touchdown drives of 28 and 18 yards supplemented the Tide’s midgame outburst to stimulate the local economy before the final gun.
No Alabama touchdown drive required more than seven snaps in a boom or doom offensive afternoon. Outside of the first and last drives, the Tide either scored a touchdown or went 3-and-out. Even then, punter James Burnip averaged 53 yards on his four punts — three of which were downed inside the 20.
That’s where the defensive efficiency factors in. Thanks the two forced fumbles and a 20-yard Ryan Williams punt return, Alabama’s average starting field position was its own 42. Thrice it started touchdown drives inside Wisconsin territory on a day starting Wisconsin quarterback Tyler Van Dyke’s day ended on the seventh play of the game.
Backup Braedyn Locke, previously of Mississippi State, took hits all afternoon. He finished averaging 4.8 yards per throw with a painfully Big Ten 13-for-26 passing line for 125 yards.
The Badgers averaged 3.6 yards a rush with its longest run (21 yards) ending in a lost fumble. No pass went for more than 25 yards as Alabama avoided the momentum swapper against an offense that never really threatened one.
Perhaps no sequence summed up the difference between these two programs than that first two drives of the second half. After Alabama zoomed for Part II of its quick strike, night-night touchdown parade, Wisconsin went full Midwest farm boy. In the shadow of the 5-play, 75-yard Alabama drive, Wisconsin slogged 75 yards in 17 plays. It bled 8 minutes and 14 merciful seconds from the third-quarter clock to score its own touchdown of the day.
But after fumbling on the first play of its next possession, Milroe needed three plays to run for this second touchdown of the day.
The difference Big Ten livestock and SEC sports cars.
The contrast between last Saturday’s sleepwalk and this one’s adrenaline shot to the jugular.
And a concrete void.
Because Alabama needed just seconds to build Wisconsin’s house of pain
One that emptied in just five Madison minutes.
Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.
