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Packers, Badgers losing trust with their fans

It might be surprising to know you’d have to go back to the early 1990s to find the professional and big-time college football team in similar states of disrepair in the same season.

This was brought home during these first cold and barren days of 2009, a strangely silent period from Green Bay to Madison in which there was no postseason for the Packers and no New Year’s Day bowl for the Badgers.

Such withdrawal raises the larger question of whether we’re in for the first extended simultaneous downturn in years from the Big Two. If not, which team would you choose to snap out of it first?

That would not be a fair question with respect to the Badgers, who have no waiver wire or free-agent pool from which to immediately upgrade. Unless there is a stud junior-college transfer out there hiding, they’re stuck with what they’ve got at quarterback.

A better question:

Which sets of leaders do you most trust to turn it around?

Is there any reason to believe in Bret Bielema anymore? If not, is there a chance Barry Alvarez would admit his mistake before it is too late?

Is there any reason to believe Ted Thompson, counter to his four-year trend, would spend a dime of the Packers’ free-agent money or draft a high-impact player in the sport that can be turned on said dime with a dramatically productive off-season? And on the chance Thompson got him the players, is Mike McCarthy the right coach in Green Bay?

In such times of dwindling patience and discretionary dollars, when high-level changes will be made more than ever on empty seats, the public trust, from low to high, seems to be aligned: Bielema, Thompson, McCarthy and Alvarez.

Bielema has the lowest trust factor because of the speed at which the Badgers have fallen from being a fundamentally sound, smart football team that knew what it was to an undisciplined, unintelligent team that doesn’t know what it is. This, of course, goes to coaching.

UW fans are an incredibly supportive lot that doesn’t mind abiding occasional mediocre football as long as their guys are upholding the high Wisconsin standard of intelligent play. That it isn’t happening with Bielema, which should put him on the hot seat for 2009.

Bielema deserves next season to prove he isn’t bumbling along with his own players, but Alvarez is on the spot, too, if the same fundamental problems persist. There’s no reason to believe Alvarez would reassume control like Bill Snyder at Kansas State, but the AD would lose credibility with inaction should nothing change.

As for McCarthy, his season-wrapping news conference was disappointing in that for each week that the Packers repeated the same basic mistakes, inquiries were answered with McCarthy’s response that “those were questions for the end of the year.” But when it came, McCarthy met such questions with vague, general answers that clarified little.

And while coaching gets no pass, it was apparent that a number of the Packers’ defensive players weren’t good enough to compete with. Thompson, whose talent evaluations have produced one playoff appearance in his four seasons, is now under pressure to fix the defensive front with free agency and the draft, but more through the former with the Packers’ vast resources.

If pressed to choose, McCarthy appears to be the right coach for the Packers, more than one could presently see Bielema as the long-term fit at Wisconsin. Both could prove otherwise next season, which suddenly has become a crucible-type year for both teams after such an empty start to 2009.

Michael Hunt is a sports columnist for The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.