Rick Wagner

And if he ends up a backup, great.

Like, then you've got Dennis Kelly sitting there for when injury strikes or Rick Wagner sitting there when injury strikes, just those kinds of things.

I could have still seen a scenario, even after Thursday's game, and I know Thursday's game was dreadful, but where the front office kind of sticks its nose out and says, "Nope, you know, we like these guys.

We have these guys.

Like, you could've, a- and if he doesn't win the job over Jacob Monk, Anthony Belton, whomever it was, then great.

You have veteran depth like Dennis Kelly, like Rick Wagner, like some of these veteran offensive linemen they've kind of had in the stable in previous years.

For whatever reason, maybe it's due to limited resources, I'm not sure, but they've gone away from that the further we've gotten into Brian Gutekunst's tenure.

That is kind of the gripe is that- Why, why did you have to see three weeks of this? Or did you not have the foresight? Or even more terrifying, did you think what you had was good? Uh, 'cause that part is, again, I don't wanna belabor the point and I don't wanna make it seem like I'm picking on Jacob Monk, but like, again, we talked about this a million times over the summer.

Right.

And that was the case with players like Matt Skura and Rick Wagner and Tony Pashos and some other guys who were here for, you know, four years, but they all, you know, got all their, Ryan Jensen really fits into this category, were only good for their very last year with the team.

And I don't think that's going to be the case with Ioane.

I think Ioane will be a good player probably next year.

Remember when coach started Billy Turner at left tackle in the playoffs, that Jennings start was like that.

I thought it was the Rick Wagner decision against San Francisco in the playoffs.

Steno would later say that they should have started Yash Naiman over Rick Wagner, or am I mixing that up?

Well, I think Rick Wagner started because they moved Turner to left tackle.

It was something like that.

I'm still sleep deprived from the other day, but he's absolutely right.

And the one thing I know for sure that Wisconsin taught me was how to work hard and how to fight through adversity and I got the talk when I was real young of there's a difference between hurt and a difference between being injured.

And I got that real early, and the guys that I was fortunate enough to come in with when I was younger, when they were older, like Ricky Wagner, Travis Frederick, Peter Kahn, Gabe Gramey, John Moffitt, I mean...

I came in at the absolute golden era for a young guy for Badger football.

But you learned how to work.