Barry Alvarez has transformed Wisconsin from Big Ten also-ran to a bowl-game fixture that plays before massive home crowds. Bob Rosato/SI
	POLL If you were to rank current Big Ten coaches in order of their accomplishments (bowls, overall record, program-building, etc.), where would Wisconsin's Barry Alvarez fall? At the top of the list Second Third Fourth Lower  View Results
	MAILBAG Submit a question or an opinion to Stewart. Your name: Your e-mail address: Your home town: Enter your question:

CHICAGO -- When it comes to college football, we all lose perspective from time to time. Most fans do it to some degree on a weekly basis -- they wouldn't be fans if they didn't -- but so do coaches. And so, too, do writers.

In last Tuesday's Mailbag, I fielded a question from a Wisconsin fan wondering why the Badgers haven't been able to return to the level of their consecutive Rose Bowl seasons of the late '90s. In the course of answering it, I took a mildly critical view of Barry Alvarez's coaching style. Two days later, Alvarez announced he would be retiring as coach at the end of this, his 16th season, to become UW's full-time athletic director, and since then I -- and I assume most people in Madison -- have found myself focusing a whole lot less on what Alvarez hasn't done these past few seasons and more on the considerable things he has accomplished over the course of his tenure.

Aside from extolling their respective teams' "good, solid nucleus of kids" or marveling at "how everyone's bought in to what we're doing," the Big Ten's head coaches spent much of Monday's conference media event here engaging in what amounted to a three-hour Alvarez love-fest, and rightfully so. As Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz -- who was an assistant with the Hawkeyes just prior to Alvarez's 1990 arrival at UW -- said, "They [the Badgers] were probably as low as any program in the conference. What he's done during the course of his career is amazing."

When you think of Wisconsin football today, you think of a team that makes annual bowl appearances and packs more than 75,000 diehards into Camp Randall Stadium for every game. If you're under the age of about 25, you don't necessarily remember that prior to Alvarez's arrival, the Badgers staged a near-annual duel with Northwestern for the conference's cellar (they won nine games in four seasons from 1986-89) and their historic stadium often went half-empty on Saturdays.

In a hallway of the Hyatt Regency on Monday, Alvarez, not normally the reflective type, admitted how gratifying it's been lately to look outside his office window and see construction crews putting the final touches on a $109 million renovation to 88-year-old Camp Randall -- a makeover would not have been remotely possible without the successes his teams have had.

"This was a program that was flat on its back and had very little tradition; they'd been to [six] bowl games in their entire history and won one," said Alvarez, who himself has gone 7-3 in bowl games (including three Rose Bowl wins) and 108-70-4 overall at UW. "Now, we're on GameDay. We've been the game of the week a number of times. We win our fair share."

After enduring three relatively mediocre seasons from 2001-'03, in which they went 20-19, the Badgers started 9-0 last season and reached the top five of the national rankings before losing their last three games. I asked Alvarez whether the timing of his decision had anything to do with the possibility that this year's team -- which must replace 13 starters, including seven NFL Draft picks -- could be in for another drop-off.

"I wouldn't read too much into it," he said. "The reason I made it was I felt I was ready. I was doing two jobs, and I felt over a period of time it would take its toll and have a negative effect on one or the other."

By smartly going ahead and announcing now that defensive coordinator Bret Bielema will be Alvarez's replacement, Wisconsin will likely be able to put together a strong recruiting class free of the uncertainty that often surrounds other programs in transition.

As for the notion that the Badgers haven't recently lived up to the standards he set in the '90s, Alvarez points out that injuries and other issues dampened what could have been potentially special seasons both last year (when star defensive end Erasmus James went down in mid-October) and particularly in 2000, when the coach learned the day of his season opener that he would have to find a way to stagger 26 player suspensions stemming from the infamous "Shoe Box" scandal (when it was discovered that UW athletes were receiving unauthorized discounts at a local athletic apparel store).

"That 2000 team [which went 9-4] was probably the best team I ever had, and we had [the season] pulled out right from under us by our previous administration, which -- and our current administration agrees with me on this -- didn't handle the [incident] properly," said Alvarez. "It disrupted us to a degree one can't even imagine. That is something that will always stick in my craw."

As for his successor, Alvarez hopes fans will be realistic when they inevitably use him as Bielema's measuring stick. "We're in a tough situation," Alvarez said. "We don't have a whole lot of talent in-state. And as I think we've seen, no one in this league is going to simply win, win, win, win, win anymore. I would expect Bret to just continue to be competitive, continue going to bowl games. I'd be surprised if Bret doesn't grow the program."