End of an era, Wisconsin AD Barry Alvarez set to retire
The Barry Alvarez era at Wisconsin is coming to an end.
Stadium’s Brett McMurphy reported that Alvarez will retire, although McMurphy wrote in a tweet that “timeline not definite yet.”
Alvarez came to Wisconsin as its head football coach in 1990 and turned a moribund program around. When he left the job in 2005 to concentrate on being the school’s athletic director, a job he started the previous year, he owned a 119-73-4 record and took the Badgers to three Rose Bowls – winning them all.
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Under his tenure as Director of Athletics, Wisconsin has won 16 team national titles, including the latest by the women’s hockey team this season, had 25 individual national champions and won 73 conference champions.
His hirings as AD have been a mixed bag. His football successor Bret Bielema did well before surprisingly leaving for Arkansas. Alvarez then hired Gary Andersen, a tenure which did not work out well before he, too, surprisingly left. The return of Wisconsin alum Paul Chryst has kept the program churning with much of the success expected from the Badgers since Alvarez’s arrival.
However, the women’s basketball team has struggled to gain a foothold and Alvarez recently hired his third coach for that program since 2011. Men’s basketball coach Greg Gard has generally done well but hasn’t been able to come close to replicating the halcyon days when Bo Ryan took the team to back-to-back Final Fours. Men’s hockey coach Tony Granato struggled through four consecutive losing seasons before winning the Big Ten regular season this year.
Nevertheless, Alvarez’s legacy is solidified in Wisconsin history as perhaps the most important figure in the school’s athletic history.
