FanNation - The Republic of Sport

I could easily write this in the Big Ten Football Group but, I feel that this is more suited to my personal blog.  This blog stems from a conversation that I had last night.  We were talking about the Big Ten and as the conversation was going on one of the guys involved in the conversation said Wisconsin has an inferiority complex.  As a Badger fan I have to admit that there's some definite truth to that.  Now for those of you who don't know what an inferiority complex is, it's basically a perceived sense of inferiority whether there's any truth to it or not. 

Now, I wasn't really much of a sports fan when University of Wisconsin sports were struggling.  As a matter of fact I really started liking sports when Barry Alvarez was turning around the athletic programs.  However, despite all of UW's successes all young Badger fans are taught that we receive absolutely no national respect.  Our national perception is that in any sport we don't get a lot of big time flashy players(note: I said we don't get a lot of big time flashy players..not saying that we don't get any flashy players).  In the minds of Wisconsin fans we see it as disrespect of our programs successes that we're not talked about at a high level.  Now, in Barry Alvarez's autobiography he talks about the UW athletic department's national perception.  He paticularly talks about ESPN's Lee Corso. Alvarez talks about how Lee Corso has always and will always suck up to Ohio State, whenever he can.  Now I'm paraphrasing Alvarez but basically Barry says that the reason Corso loves Ohio State so much is because when he was head coach at Indiana he was beaten badly by Woody Hayes...so now Corso feels obligated to love OSU.  

UW's Big Ten perception is that we're right in the middle of the conference's hierarchy.  The top end of the conference is Michigan and Ohio State and even to some extent Penn State.  Every UW fan, including myself, will say that Wisconsin is at that upper level in the conference.  I don't know if other people feel that way about UW.  But, generally the atmosphere's at Camp Randall or the Kohl Center are at the top of the list for college atmospheres.  Every year it's the same things can Bo Ryan or can Bret Bielema continue the success.  I only used those two coaches because they're generally the guys that people recognize as coaches in the UW athletic department.  I guess Wisconsin needs to win a major National Championship..or reach a BCS game again before people start to really respect us again.  

As always thoughts and comments are welcome.