Locally-rooted Badger discusses big changes for Wisconsin
By Dan Truttschel
Correspondent
It’s safe to say the first three weeks of the 2012 season have been filled with change and transition for the Wisconsin football team.
And former Big Foot star Travis Frederick has found himself right in the middle of things.
Literally.
The junior center recently began playing for his third position coach in the past year when head coach Bret Bielema stunned everyone and fired first-year offensive line coach Mike Markuson after just two weeks.
Bielema went one step further with his surprises when he promoted 27-year-old Bart Miller to replace Markuson on an interim basis.
It’s only been a week, but the line – and Frederick – are adjusting, he said in a telephone interview Tuesday night.
“It’s definitely been a week in transition for us,” he said. “We’ve come a long way in that one week, and we’ve come a little bit further now even this week.
“A lot of the things that coach Miller does are very similar to things we’ve done in the past. It’s not as hard as a transition for us if we had a completely new coach because coach Miller does a lot of things we had done in the past.”
Miller is not a stranger to the UW program, as he served as a graduate assistant prior to the 2011 season and worked with former offensive line coach Bob Bostad, who he played for at New Mexico.
Having a similar way of thinking as Bostad has helped ease the change, Frederick said.
Now it’s just a matter of getting everything back on track.
“We don’t have to necessarily train new muscle memory,” he said. “It’s a matter of retraining old muscle memory.”
Frederick said he and his fellow “linemates” have enjoyed working with Miller – who at 27 years old, isn’t that far removed from his college days himself.
“I think he’s a tremendous coach, and we knew that coming in,” Frederick said. “He’s been a tremendous person to have around. He helped kind of bridge that gap between coach Bostad and coach Markusan. … He’s just someone we can lean on and will help make us better.”
Frederick said the line is well aware that as a unit, it has underachieved in the Badgers’ first three games, and that’s something that has to change.
The line has to get back to doing what it does best, he said, and that’s knocking people off the football and making huge holes for the running backs to get through.
“We just have not been playing the way we know how to play and the way we should be playing,” he said. “The first two games we didn’t play physically the way we normally do.
“This (last) game against Utah State, we played a lot more physically. That goes back to what we used to do under coach Bostad. We’re continually improving and making small steps. I think we’re on the right track.”
And that’s the goal heading into this weekend’s game against the University of Texas-El Paso, Frederick said, to just keep moving in the right direction.
“Our goal is just to continue to improve as an offensive line,” he said. “We’re going to focus on our technique things, continuing to be physical and dominating the line of scrimmage.”
