Bret Bielema acknowledged he knew this day was coming. From the moment he accepted the job to be the next Illinois football coach, he understood the road through the Big Ten West eventually would lead him back to Camp Randall Stadium, where his head coaching career began and blossomed at Wisconsin.
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Now that the day has nearly arrived, Bielema is doing his best to downplay its significance.
“For the last six months, I’ve received many opportunities to do (an) exclusive return from newspapers to magazines, television shows,” Bielema told reporters at his weekly news conference. “I made a decision early on I was going to say no to all of them because I don’t want the feature to be on me.
“But I also told our players the other day, ‘Listen, I know this is going to get a lot of questions about me, but this is about Illinois. This is why I’m here. This is what I’m doing.’ I think it’s a lot easier for the outside world to focus on that rather than our football team.”
Bielema will return to Madison on Saturday when Illinois (3-1) plays Wisconsin (2-2) at 11 a.m. CT. It will mark his first game in Camp Randall Stadium as a head coach in 10 years — since his Wisconsin team lost 21-14 in overtime to No. 6 Ohio State on Nov. 17, 2012. But even if Bielema would prefer the attention be placed elsewhere — he declined an interview request with The Athletic this week in keeping with that mission — his presence will surely be one of the intriguing storylines for Badgers fans.
Will fans boo him? Cheer him? Demonstrate indifference? It likely depends on how you feel about Bielema, whose Wisconsin legacy is complicated, though perhaps better appreciated with the passage of time.
“I would anticipate him getting booed just because that seems what fans do nowadays, whether right or wrong,” said Wisconsin defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard, who started at safety as a senior under Bielema in 2004 when Bielema took over as the Badgers’ defensive coordinator. “Obviously, he had a great run here. He did a lot of tremendous things. He took over the program in a good spot and he left it in a good spot. As a head coach, I think you’ve got to feel good about that.
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“I love what he did for the program when he was here. Not all fans feel that way, as always. Who knows? I’ve seen hall of fame players get booed because they left for a year. I wouldn’t anticipate anything different here just because people get emotional and that’s the way it rolls.”
Bielema coached Wisconsin to three AP top-10 finishes. (Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images)Bielema spent nine seasons with Wisconsin, two as the defensive coordinator from 2004-05, during which time he became head coach Barry Alvarez’s handpicked successor. Bielema then served as Wisconsin’s head coach for the next seven seasons. He compiled an impressive 68-24 record, which represents the second-most wins in school history behind Alvarez’s 120 (current Badgers coach Paul Chryst can tie Bielema with 68 victories on Saturday). Bielema led Wisconsin to three consecutive Big Ten titles and Rose Bowl appearances. The Badgers haven’t won a Big Ten championship since Bielema’s final game, a 70-31 beatdown of Nebraska in 2012.
Yet it isn’t Bielema’s on-field record that rankled so many Badgers supporters, although his 0-2 mark in the Rose Bowl stood out when juxtaposed against Alvarez’s three Rose Bowl wins. Rather, it’s about everything that happened after Bielema left.
There likely was never going to be an ideal time for Bielema to exit. He did so three days after Wisconsin’s Big Ten title game victory against Nebraska in December 2012 by taking the Arkansas job. Bielema informed Alvarez when the two were in New York for the National Football Foundation Hall of Fame dinner that he had already accepted the position. The two men didn’t speak to each other for a couple of years, although each still had plenty to say to others.
When Bielema left Wisconsin, he bemoaned the Badgers’ inability to offer assistant coaches higher salaries and said he believed he would have a better chance to win a national championship at Arkansas because the Razorbacks played in the SEC. Badgers fans voiced their displeasure across his Twitter feed and mocked him by wearing T-shirts and making signs that read: “We will never forget you, Bert.”
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Bielema spent one Sunday in January 2013 engaging Wisconsin fans and supporters on Twitter with a series of contentious comments, telling one person who poked Bielema about losing the 2011 Rose Bowl against TCU to “enjoy life alone.”
In August 2013, Alvarez told USA Today: “I haven’t had one person say, ‘Well, it’s too bad Bret left’ or ‘We were sorry to see Bret leave’ or ‘Couldn’t you have paid the assistants more money to keep him?’ Not one.”
Then, in September 2013, Bielema’s wife, Jen, infamously tweeted #karma following Wisconsin’s controversial 32-30 loss at Arizona State on an officiating blunder, which only infuriated Badgers fans further. Bielema’s first Arkansas team was 3-0 at the time. Perhaps in an ironic karmic twist, the Razorbacks lost their final nine games that season. Bielema ultimately was fired in 2017 with a 29-34 overall record and an 11-29 SEC mark. During his tenure, however, Alvarez and Bielema slowly found their way back to each other, which represented a significant step in moving on.
Bielema said that, late in his second season at Arkansas in 2014 after his team defeated nationally ranked LSU and Ole Miss in consecutive shutouts, he received a hand-written note from Alvarez. At the Hall of Fame dinner in New York in December 2015, he sat down with Alvarez and spoke to him in person for the first time since their hotel meeting three years earlier.
“The world is based on relationships,” Bielema told The Athletic last summer. “When I was the head coach there, Coach and I were about as close as anybody could possibly get. And so I know when I left, it hurt him and it hurt me and it hurt a lot of people. But only time heals those types of moments and just being honest and real with him. He and I, a couple years after I left I think, kind of put water under the bridge and let it go.”
In the ensuing years, Bielema said he returned to Madison twice. One of those visits occurred in March 2020 when he was the New York Giants outside linebackers coach. He evaluated prospects and put defensive players through drills during Wisconsin’s pro day in the McClain Center. When the Illinois job opened nine months later following Lovie Smith’s firing, Bielema reached out to Alvarez and asked if he would put a good word in for him with Illini athletic director Josh Whitman. Alvarez told Whitman that Bielema was an ideal fit because he was from Illinois and knew how to win in the Big Ten.
Bielema is 8-8 at Illinois and helped the Illini beat two nationally ranked teams on the road in a season last year for the first time in 20 years. He is attempting to build a Big Ten West contender that can compete with and overtake Wisconsin, using some of the same principles that helped him succeed in Madison (Illinois running back Chase Brown, for example, leads the nation in rushing yards). In his first matchup against Wisconsin last season in Champaign, Ill., the Badgers rolled to a 24-0 victory.
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In the 10 years since Bielema left, Wisconsin has largely continued to play at a high level, for two years under Gary Andersen and the past eight under Chryst. The Badgers are 87-32 (.731 winning percentage) since the start of the 2013 season, which likely helped to soften the blow of his departure. Bielema was asked last summer before his first season at Illinois whether he had thought about his legacy at Wisconsin or how fans viewed him.
“I haven’t even really given it a thought,” Bielema said. “I think when you’re in coaching, you don’t think that way until you’re probably done. The thing I obviously put a premium on is relationships. When I got the (Illinois) job, the amount of former players that reached out to me and congratulated me and were excited but then they’d all say, ‘Oh, I can’t believe you’re in the league.’ You know, one of those shots. But the relationships that I built and created and won games with there are still on the forefront, which is huge.”
Bielema and Illinois lost 24-0 at home to Wisconsin last year. (Ron Johnson / USA Today)Bielema said this week that he gained a greater appreciation for some of what Wisconsin had to offer after he left. In particular, he cited the fact that home games were frequently sold out and the environment was memorable. In his final season at Wisconsin, the average attendance was 80,005 people, or 99.6 percent of the Camp Randall Stadium capacity. In his first season at Arkansas in 2013, attendance reached a 10-year low. Illinois filled, on average, just 58.2 percent of its stadium capacity last season.
“I never had to really sit in a meeting and listen about ticket sales or the ability to pack the stadium (like) when I went to Arkansas and then obviously when I came here,” Bielema said. “It was just a foregone conclusion that the crowd was going to be there. They were going to show up and it was going to be sold out. That’s one of the things that I don’t think people have an idea that an environment like that, how ideal that is to play in week in and week out.”
Bielema planned to talk to his Illinois players about the environment they’ll be walking into, about the layout of the stadium and that “Jump Around” following the third quarter will be a unique experience. But the less he talks about himself in public, the better.
He told reporters this week that he doesn’t expect to have an emotional moment from his return until after the game. He cited previous visits while Wisconsin’s defensive coordinator and later as head coach to Iowa’s Kinnick Stadium, where he played and coached as an assistant, as examples that showed him how the game should be handled.
“So this year, it’s really no different,” Bielema said.
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Bielema’s return isn’t likely to strike a chord with the actual participants. Wisconsin running back Braelon Allen, an 18-year-old sophomore, was asked about Bielema coming back and admitted he wasn’t aware he had ever coached at Wisconsin. Allen was 8 when Bielema coached his last game there. But for fans of a certain age, who witnessed Bielema’s tenure and all the subsequent drama, it won’t be surprising for his presence on the visiting sideline to rekindle a range of emotions.
(Top photo: Ron Johnson / USA Today)
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