After Saturday's narrow victory against Northern Iowa the company line was that this was a good thing and a great learning opportunity for the 2012 Badgers.
The coaches are right, it was a major learning opportunity, but it's one that they should've already learned and here's why:
Wisconsin has a history of not learning lessons from mistakes of the past. It's kind of becoming a hallmark of this program as of late.
What do I mean by that? Well, just look back to last season and you'll see what I mean.
In fact Shelton Johnson may have said it best in his post game interview, "It was kind of a representation of what happened last year and the things we were trying to get rid of this year."
"Just big plays, it's just things like that," said Johnson. "We play well for 90% of the game and those two plays, the screen or lose contain and it ends up hurting us a lot."
Johnson clearly represented the frustration of what happened against UNI and to me that's a good thing.
Despite acknowledging issues with the punt protection the Badgers made the same mistake in punt protection more than once – allowing a man to go unblocked right to the punter and blocking punts. Sure, they tried to switch up personnel in the protection, but that didn't work either.
I highly doubt I need to remind you of the horrid back to back hail mary losses, right? The only difference was that one was a lucky play and one was a completely blown assignment. The results were the same though, Wisconsin didn't learn it's lesson the first time around.
Fast forward to last Saturday and the comeback by the Panthers came on the exact same play and all within a few possessions, so the lesson should've and could've been taught to the Badgers players on the sidelines. Yet, they didn't learn the lesson once again and it nearly cost them an embarrassing loss.
With the Badgers heading out west to take on a tricky Oregon State team it's time for the Badgers to show us that they've made the third time a charm and actually correct the mistakes they made on very specific plays and situations.
I tend to believe this team is a bit more capable of learning those lessons because there are so many new pieces to the team and getting communications issues and schematic issues corrected can be done.
Week two will be the key in seeing if anything has actually been learned and as Bielema said "good teams make the biggest jumps from week one to week two." If Wisconsin corrects these issues we could be in for another special season. If not, well, we will at least know what this team is.
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