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he drive is relatively short and pleasantly
scenic by the time the leaves fall off the trees
in autumn. It's about 175 miles from Madison
to Iowa City; about three hours through the heartland.
The Wisconsin football team has customarily
spent Friday night in Cedar Rapids, which has forever claimed Grant Wood, Ashton Kutcher, Kurt Warner and Zach Johnson, among others.
It's about a 45-minute drive to Kinnick Stadium
on game day.
Like all road trips, there can be glitches.
In 2006, an audible (and mechanic) had to be
called when the No. 3 bus in the four-bus caravan
from Madison to Cedar Rapids encountered some
mechanical problems related to its air brakes.
The disabled bus was emptied of players, who
jumped aboard the No. 4 bus and bumped the supervisory personnel. In order to stay on schedule,
the three team buses got back on the road.
Meanwhile, the UW administrators, cheerleaders,
et al., got some unexpected ground time in Dubuque
until one of the buses came back for them.
In 1996, coinciding historically with Ron Dayne's
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VARSITY October 31, 2013
freshman year, Barry Alvarez, then the UW head
coach, remembered "making one of the biggest
coaching mistakes that I ever made in coaching."
After the Badgers had made the Friday afternoon
trek to their hotel, he decided to take the team out
for dinner that night in the Amana Colonies, 20
miles southwest of Cedar Rapids.
"I remember one of my players asking, 'Coach, we
just drove all the way down here, why are we driving farther to eat?"' said Alvarez, recalling that he
didn't have a good answer to the question.
"The kids wanted to go to the hotel and relax; they
wanted to get off their feet and eat whatever they
normally ate and I loaded them back up on the bus
to drive them to Amana Colonies.
"Bad mistake."
The following day, Iowa won 31-0.
Win or lose, Alvarez was never a big fan of the
three-hour bus ride back home after the game.
"But the drive down on Friday was always peaceful," he said. "You could clear your head a little bit.
You could jot down some notes. You could get caught
up on your reading and recruiting."
Ben Strickland has always felt the same way about
