In this week's episode of The Wisconsin Sportscast, Lucas and Oates spend some time looking at how Badger’s athletics has changed over the years before diving into the mess the Packers made on Sunday. There have been Fire Fickell chants for a while, and now those chants are switching to Fire LaFleur. Both he and Jordan Love had an awful day on Sunday as both of them seemed to be making bad decisions all day. On LaFleur’s end, why would he go for big points with 12 minutes left in the 4th instead of just taking the field goal? On Love’s end, why is he throwing 50 yards downfield to someone with three defenders on him on a first down? Love is, and continues to be, a great quarterback, and is the future of the program. But he has a tendency to make some questionable decisions, especially when he’s up against the clock. That said, LaFleur seems to want to run the ball as much as possible instead of letting his great quarterback throw the ball. The team was simply not ready to play on Sunday. Did LaFleur underestimate the Panthers? Who knows. 

LaFleur seems to act like he has a Super Bowl caliber team at all times, even though they aren’t playing like it. Oates says that yes, the roster itself is capable of a Super Bowl, but there are a handful of Super Bowl rosters in the league right now. And while the roster might be there, they aren’t playing up to snuff. Penalties are killing them, especially holding and motion penalties. These sorts of stupid mistakes are costing the team in a real way, and while they show some signs of greatness here and there they still fall to teams they should easily beat. It’s hard to blame great players every week, which means that the blame has to fall to LaFleur. 

Meanwhile, the Badgers look likely to start a freshman quarterback on Saturday when they take on the Washington Huskies. Carter Smith is a freshman from Florida, and at this point why not play him. It’s not like the job is getting done on the field anyways, worse comes to worse it’s more of the same. We don’t know too much about Smith, but we hear from his coaches in Florida that he’s a dual-threat who can run the ball. We’ll see on Saturday if he can actually live up to that. The real question is: does Luke Fickell know anything about his quarterbacks? Why hasn’t he been playing already? Was it to save a red shirt year? And where’s Billy Edwards? We wish Carter Smith the best, because anything else can’t be worse than what the Badgers are already dealing with. And if he does perform well, that could give the team some momentum through the end of the season and beyond. 

The Wisconsin Sportscast with Lucas & Oates is a Cap Times podcast produced by Nate Wegehaupt. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.