November at Camp Randall: The Badgers' Season Comes Home to the Cold
There is no November ritual in Wisconsin like a Camp Randall Saturday — 80,000 people, the fifth quarter, and Big Ten football in its natural weather. The home stretch, from the city's seat.
Camp Randall Stadium has hosted Wisconsin football since 1917 on ground that was a Civil War training camp, and in November the place becomes what it was always meant to be: a bowl of 80,000 people in red, breathing steam, watching Big Ten football in the cold it was designed for. The Badgers' season reaches its decisive stretch this month, with the conference race, the rivalry trophies and bowl position all in play under the lights and the early dark.
The game-day machinery is one of Madison's great civic operations: the Regent Street corridor's pregame economy, the UW Marching Band's Fifth Quarter — the postgame performance that keeps the student section in its seats win or lose, a tradition invented here and imitated everywhere — and 'Jump Around,' the between-quarters eruption that registers on the geology department's seismographs and on every visiting team's composure. November adds the senior-day ceremonies and the weather: Camp Randall in a cold rain or early snow is a home-field advantage with a wind chill.
The trophy case tells the month's stakes. The Badgers play for Paul Bunyan's Axe against Minnesota — the longest-running rivalry in major college football — and for the Heartland Trophy against Iowa, in games whose results furnish a year of conversation in both directions. Wisconsin's program identity — the walk-ons made good, the offensive lines recruited from the state's small towns, the running game as folk art — is the state's self-image in pads, which is why the whole of Wisconsin, not just its alumni, claims the team.
The winter sports machine starts alongside football's finish: Badger men's and women's hockey at the Kohl Center and LaBahn Arena — programs with national championships and the nation's best crowds — and basketball's opening weeks, in a state that treats the Kohl Center's student section as a civic institution too.
Our sports desk will cover the Badgers as the state's team from the capital's seat: game coverage, the recruiting of Wisconsin's own, and the programs' business as public business. November belongs to Camp Randall. Dress like you mean it, and stay for the Fifth Quarter.