Defensive Facelift on the Way for Wisconsin Badgers

When the Wisconsin Badgers made the move to bring in former Utah State Aggies coach Gary Anderson the Badger faithful knew a defensive mix-up was on its way. With his first recruiting class in the books the transition to a 3-4 defense is obviously  on its way.

While with the Aggies, Anderson had a defensive coordinator in Dave Aranda who loved to be unique and send players from all over the place. Aranda was a the mastermind of a defense that was ranked 14th in all of NCAAF in 2012 and was one of the best in the entire WAC. 

Now, for years the Badgers defense has been much like its citizenry more vanilla, traditional and productive–while it won’t happen overnight a change is going to come on the defensive front in the coming seasons.

In his first recruiting class Anderson made the commitment to speed and players who would fit well into a 3-4 defense. For example, both Leon Jacobs and Donnell Vercher are recruits who are more athletic defensive players–Jacobs was a a star basketball player in High School and even won a dunk contest.

Armada’s number one goal in his first season is definitely to get faster as he said “to do some of the things that we’re aiming to do, we need speed.”

Badgers fans will more than likely be excited by the new schemes and blitzes that are now possible, but keep in mind no transition like this is easy.

Anderson’s identity change on the team will either go really good or really bad as their isn’t really any middle ground when changing an age-old philosophy at such a traditional Big 10 University.