In May, Shane Hoffman became the first person to graduate from the UW’s accelerated program for training rural physicians. Jeff Miller

Shane Hoffman ’18, MD’25 can see the future he wants clearly: he’s a surgeon at a clinic or small hospital in rural Wisconsin — perhaps somewhere in the far northern part of the state, where his family has deep roots. His medical practice will allow residents to access care quickly and stay closer to their homes and families.

“Hospitals are going under because they can’t attract people to these rural communities,” says Hoffman, who grew up near Lake Mills, Wisconsin. “I want to live in a small town or in the country. It’s where I feel most at home.”

In May, Hoffman became the first graduate of a program at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health that reduces the time it takes to train doctors who are interested in serving rural parts of the state. Students in the accelerated program take all the same required courses but graduate in three years instead of four.

“There’s a significant geographic disconnect in Wisconsin between where people live and where doctors practice,” says Joseph Holt ’91, director of the UW’s rural medicine program. “As many as 31 percent of the state’s residents live in rural areas, yet only one in 10 physicians practice in these rural areas. It’s imperative that we address this problem, because the rural physician shortage is only going to increase as current physicians retire and the population ages.”

The goal of the accelerated program is to instill in graduates a desire to practice in rural Wisconsin — there are no contracts or other requirements. Hoffman’s clinical rotations as a medical school student took him to rural areas all over the state. What he witnessed only increased his resolve to practice rural medicine.

“It makes me sad to walk through an empty hospital wing,” Hoffman says. “People are being shipped to bigger cities because of staff shortages in these rural areas.”

For more than 40 years, UW researchers have been working to turn satellite data into faster and more accurate weather forecasts. Althea Dotzour

The University of Wisconsin–Madison may be the birthplace of satellite meteorology, but scientists on campus have never stopped developing new ways for space-based instruments to protect and improve the lives of people back on Earth.

For more than 40 years, researchers at the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) — a partnership between UW–Madison and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — have been working to turn satellite data into faster and more accurate weather forecasts. They are protecting you and your community in ways you may not expect.

“Technology is constantly advancing, improving our ability to observe our surroundings and enhancing our lives,” says Tristan L’Ecuyer, CIMSS director and a satellite researcher. “The innovative research we do here plays a critical role in delivering essential satellite products that support NOAA’s mission to improve public safety and well-being and effectively manage our nation’s resources.”

Here are just a few of the most recent ways CIMSS has made Americans safer:

• AI-assisted hurricane prediction: Used by agencies worldwide, CIMSS algorithms add speed and accuracy to assessments of hurricanes that can abruptly grow stronger and shift their tracks.
• Dodging lightning: A CIMSS-built tool called ProbSevere employs AI to sharpen severe weather predictions, shortening the wait for forecasts that protect people and their property from lightning, heavy rain, hail, and tornadoes.
• Fighting wildfires: The CIMSS-designed Next Generation Fire System provides highly accurate, real-time information on a wildfire’s location, movement, size, and intensity.
• Protecting against floods: The National Weather Service uses a mapping tool developed at CIMSS to quickly provide situational awareness of changing conditions and flood risks.
• Smoother and safer airplane flights: Researchers working on the CIMSS Turbulence Product use AI to help pilots avoid the atmospheric conditions that make flights uncomfortably bumpy — or worse.

Mnookin: “Creating opportunities for respectful dialogue across our differences of background and beliefs, and building a shared appreciation for our pluralistic society, are our imperative.” Althea Dotzour

In July, Chancellor Jennifer L. Mnookin announced a series of administrative changes to improve how UW–Madison supports all undergraduate students through centralized programs and resources.

Last fall, Mnookin asked former provost Charles Isbell to lead a comprehensive review of the undergraduate experience and provide recommendations that would bolster retention and graduation rates. The resulting working group suggested enhancing support for students with financial need and first-generation students in particular; developing mechanisms for providing data-driven student support across the undergraduate population; and streamlining campuswide assistance to help students more easily navigate available resources.

Accepting these recommendations, Mnookin has directed campus to reorganize student assistance along three functional lines. Efforts related to student well-being, involvement, and belonging will be centralized within Student Affairs. Academic support resources will be housed within the Division for Teaching and Learning. And initiatives around financial support will be run by the Office of Student Financial Aid.

In addition, a new office focused on serving first-generation students and students with financial need will open within Student Affairs during the upcoming academic year. Support services for both groups of students were previously dispersed across multiple units on campus.

As a result of this consolidation, the university is sunsetting the Division of Diversity, Equity & Educational Achievement (DDEEA) as a freestanding unit. DDEEA’s portfolio — which includes scholarship-linked student assistance, employee support, and institutional data collection — will be relocated by function to the Division of Teaching and Learning, the Office of Human Resources, and the Data, Academic Planning & Institutional Research unit.

“I believe these changes will allow us to serve many more students with an even greater array of resources,” Mnookin said.

She noted that the university will continue to support the scholarships and programs formerly administered by DDEEA, including the PEOPLE, Posse, and First Wave cohorts. The same is true for campus’s student cultural centers, residential learning communities, and events that promote cross-cultural exchange and learning.

“Diversity of all kinds, including both diversity of viewpoint and diversity of identity and background, remains a core value of our university,” Mnookin said. “We must create the conditions here, including through programs and support services, that allow all of our students, faculty, and staff to flourish and to reach their full potential.

“Fostering cross-cultural competency among our students will prepare them to thrive in our complex world. Creating opportunities for respectful dialogue across our differences of background and beliefs, and building a shared appreciation for our pluralistic society, are our imperative.”

Mike Grall of Fulcrum Solutions watches PEAR (Piano Education in Augmented Reality) founder Mason Baloun use a virtual reality headset. Paul L. Newby II

Housed at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, the Tech Exploration Lab focuses on emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, Internet of Things, machine learning, and robotics. Students work on innovative projects under the guidance of alumni and industry partners who offer mentorship and resources. Among them: creating an app that assists Alzheimer’s caregivers and refining the user experience on Airbnb’s website.

Launched last semester, the Tech Exploration Lab is a cross-campus collaboration led by the Wisconsin School of Business and the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. Its 14 industry mentors are UW alumni from leading firms in retail, tech, and venture capital, including Salesforce and Amazon.

“We believe the best learning happens when students engage with real problems from industry,” says Sandra Bradley MS’90, the lab’s executive director. “Our mentors and partner companies are the driving force behind that experience. By bringing their toughest challenges into the lab, companies not only give students an invaluable opportunity to experiment, but they also gain something just as powerful: fresh thinking, rapid prototyping, and insights that can directly advance their own innovation efforts in a low-risk environment.”

For Cub Foods CIO Luke Anderson ’98, mentoring students is a way to support the next generation of innovators.

“The Tech Exploration Lab has been a great resource for us to explore how AI can benefit our business, without the high risk that usually comes with early experimentation,” he says. “Through our engagement with the lab, we’ve been able to surface fresh ideas from talented students, test potential applications in a low-stakes environment, and get clearer insights into where AI could drive real value for our operations.”

Kurt Kober MBA’07, an entrepreneur and the former division president of the Honest Company, worked with a student team that developed an AI model to monitor changes in skin health.

“I came into the Tech Exploration Lab to mentor students, but I walked away with something I didn’t expect: momentum,” Kober says.

“The lab’s interdisciplinary, experimental spirit gave me the space — and the spark — to test an idea I’d been quietly incubating in the wellness space. Sometimes, the best breakthroughs happen when curiosity, collaboration, and a little Badger grit collide.”

Jeff Miller

A flagship financial aid program at UW–Madison that provides generous support to in-state students from low- to moderate-income families increases student retention by several percentage points, according to new research.

The study, scheduled for publication in the Peabody Journal of Education, is the first to assess the long-term outcomes of Bucky’s Tuition Promise, which began in 2018.

Bucky’s Tuition Promise guarantees four years of tuition and segregated fees for any incoming freshman from Wisconsin whose family’s annual household adjusted
gross income is $65,000 or less. Transfer students can qualify for up to two years.

Prior research has shown that being eligible for Bucky’s Tuition Promise increases the probability that a lower-income student from Wisconsin will accept an enrollment
offer from UW–Madison. The new study looks at what happens to the students once they arrive on campus.

“We wanted to make sure that this program wasn’t just bringing students to campus but that those students went on to have successful college careers here,” says Amberly Dziesinski, the study’s author and a research analyst in the UW’s Student Success through Applied Research Lab.

Comparing students closest to either side of the income eligibility threshold, Dziesinski found that the retention rate going into the second year for Bucky’s Tuition Promise students close to the eligibility threshold was 96.6 percent, compared to 93.4 percent for the control group of ineligible students.

The difference of three percentage points is significant, she says, because the UW’s retention rates are already very high across the board.

The Green Fund supported installing bird-safe windows around campus. Lauren Graves

Students at UW–Madison are often quick to notice opportunities to improve the sustainability of campus facilities. However, many don’t have the resources to solve the problem on their own. That’s why the UW Office of Sustainability created the Green Fund program, which supports student-initiated environmental projects.

Students bring their proposals to the Green Fund staff, who help them collect data, write funding proposals, implement a project, and report on the outcomes. Since launching in 2017, it has supported such initiatives as installing bird-safe windows around campus, reducing waste in dining halls, and installing a BCycle station at the Arboretum Visitor Center.

In the last academic year, the Green Fund received 15 applications, the highest number ever.

“We approve most applications we receive,” says program manager Ian Aley MS’17. “If an idea isn’t ready right away, we offer feedback and continue to support the student team until it’s ready for approval.”

In 2022, the UW grounds crew approached Office of Sustainability staff about replacing seven of their fossil-fuel-powered riding lawn mowers with electric ones. The Green Fund staff invited the student group Campus Leaders for Energy Action Now (CLEAN) to collaborate on the project.

Aley helped the CLEAN students calculate the cost savings and carbon impact of the conversion to electric. They also conducted interviews with the mower operators to learn about their process. The result: swapping out the diesel and gas mowers for electric models.

The data collected by the students will inform future electrification efforts on campus.

UW–Madison is one of the world’s leading research universities, and federal funding is vital to its work. Taylor Wolfram

One of the most pressing issues on campus in 2025 has been the threat to federally funded research. UW–Madison’s research expenditures top $1.7 billion a year, and about half of that comes from federal grants. When the government announced changes that would limit those funds, the UW felt, in Chancellor Jennifer L. Mnookin’s understated phrase, “deep concern.” Although a relatively small number of grants have been cut so far, all of them face uncertainty, and delayed decisions on future grants only add to the uncertainty. The effects could extend well beyond the lab.

The On Wisconsin team chose this issue’s cover subject with several purposes in mind. One is obvious: we think that Immuto Scientific has an interesting story. Another is about timing: this year marks the centennial for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the organization that manages UW–Madison’s intellectual property. WARF helps get discoveries out of the lab and into the hands of people who can use them. It’s been part of some of the UW’s biggest research successes: vitamin D enrichment, warfarin, the UW Solution for organ transplants, and more. Those discoveries and inventions have helped millions of people, and they’ve proven lucrative, providing funding for more UW research.

But Immuto’s story also illustrates one aspect of the importance of UW–Madison’s research enterprise. Immuto has a product that could revolutionize drug development, and it aims to create its own drugs — including a treatment for a deadly blood cancer. But the company didn’t just form out of good ideas and a savvy business plan. It was helped along by federally funded research.

Immuto’s leaders are Faraz Choudhury PhD’17 and Daniel Benjamin ’16, MS’17, PhD’21, and its technology grew out of work they did with Michael Sussman. Sussman’s lab receives funding from the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. Immuto itself received a National Institutes of Health SEED program grant. Federal research funding helped Badger scientists conduct the studies that underlie Immuto, long before anyone knew that those studies might lead to patentable discoveries or that those discoveries might prove profitable. Private companies are unlikely to provide funding for early discovery work — it seldom leads to a financial return. Federal funding helps scientists do the work of discovery that businesses will build on later.

UW–Madison is one of the world’s leading research universities, and federal funding is vital to its work. That funding is under threat, and it’s crucial to realize what’s at stake. You’ll be seeing more about the UW’s research work in coming issues. If you’d like more frequent updates, visit news.wisc.edu/research-impact, and if you want to see five ways you can help protect UW research, see uwalumni.com/news/how-to-fight-for-the-uws-future.

A special kind of grit (left to right): Rowen Ellenberg ’24, MS’25; Christian de Vaal x’27; and Bob Liking ’25. Althea Dotzour

The UW men’s cross-country team is used to leaving the Big Ten competition in the dust.

The Badgers have won seven straight conference championships. They’ve captured 14 titles in the 17 years that Mick Byrne has been at the helm, making him the winningest cross-country coach in Big Ten history. Last season, to no one’s surprise, Byrne was named the Big Ten men’s cross-country Coach of the Year — for the 15th time.

Cross country has been a Big Ten sport since the conference formed more than a century ago, and all told, the men’s squad has tallied an astounding 57 Big Ten championships, five NCAA championships, and 38 top-10 finishes at the nationals, including a fourth-place spot last season. Four UW runners have won individual national championships: Walter Mehl ’40, MPH’46, PhD’51 in 1939, Tim Hacker ’86, MS’91, PhD’96 in 1985, Simon Bairu ’07 in 2004 and 2005, and Morgan McDonald ’19 in 2018.

Can we assume that this perpetually winning team will win again in the 2025 season, which runs from September through November? While no one would count them out, there are obstacles on this year’s path to the finish line.

For one, the West Coast schools that joined the Big Ten in the 2024–25 season offer stiff competition, with Oregon looking particularly strong. For another, all-time Badger great Bob Liking ’25 has graduated.

Liking won four Big Ten men’s cross-country titles, becoming only the fourth athlete to accomplish that feat. Last season, he set a Big Ten record of 22 minutes, 47.3 seconds for an eight-kilometer race, breaking the previous record by nearly 25 seconds.

How do you follow a Bob Liking? According to Coach Byrne, it’s by “finding another Bob Liking.” Success breeds success, and runners from around the world are eager to join the UW program. Byrne has recruited several heirs apparent who turned in strong showings last season, including Christian de Vaal x’27, Matan Ivri x’28, Johnny Livingstone x’27, Liam Newhart x’28, and Micah Wilson x’27.

“We have some good young guys who’ve served their apprenticeship under Bob’s leadership,” Byrne says. “And now they’re ready to step into the leadership role themselves.”

Last season, de Vaal finished seventh at the Big Ten championships, and he benefited from Liking’s example. “Bob was someone I looked up to for being so professional in his approach to training,” says de Vaal, who came to UW–Madison from Auckland, New Zealand. “I’d like to serve that function for the new guys on the team.”

Distance runners require a special kind of grit. They train year-round and participate in three sports: cross country, indoor track, and outdoor track. A crucial skill, according to Byrne, is patience.

“It’s all about trusting the system and not rushing the system,” he says. “In our sport, long and steady is a lot better than just hammering all the time and wanting those quick results.”

Raised in Ireland, Byrne came to the UW in 2008 after excelling as a distance runner at Rhode Island’s Providence College and as a coach at New York’s Iona College. He’s the director of track and field and cross country, overseeing both the men’s and women’s programs. This is a guy who’s nurtured six Olympians and 12 NCAA individual champions, along with bringing home the 2011 NCAA championship in men’s cross country — an achievement that earned him national Coach of the Year honors. He maintains his passion for the work despite the long hours and incessant travel of a three-season sport.

Above all, Byrne sees himself as a teacher. He spent 13 years as an educator in New York City, developing his empathy and listening skills. Understanding that a coach can’t control a race, he teaches his runners how to take control themselves.

“I always say, ‘I don’t know how this race is going to go. I can give you a couple of scenarios.’ And we try to have a plan for each of those scenarios. But I prefer to teach our athletes to trust their instincts. Great athletes always have great instincts, and I give them the freedom to make choices in a race.”

The close-knit cross-country team gets a boost from the Badger faithful who cheer on runners at the Thomas Zimmer Championship Course. The UW’s home field, which last year hosted the NCAA championships, is renowned as spectator-friendly. The inner and outer loops allow everyone to see a race develop — a thrill for both the UW athletes and fans.

What makes UW men’s cross country so extraordinary, year after year? Byrne points to the program’s storied past and sums it up in a single word: pride. The runners, he says, love putting on the UW–Madison uniform.

“There’s a 50-year Badger legacy that we’re carrying on,” notes de Vaal. “If that doesn’t give you motivation, I don’t know what will.”

The border-battle football rivalry between the University of Wisconsin Badgers and University of Minnesota Gophers was already one of the oldest in the country, dating to 1890.

Other sports — notably men’s and women’s hockey — would eventually contribute their own chapters to the storied Badger-Gopher matchups, but in 1962, football was king. What happened in Camp Randall Stadium on that November day still resonates, more than six decades later.

“The most significant game of all in a highly significant rivalry,” says Joel Maturi, a Minnesota native who was an assistant athletic director at UW–Madison and, later, athletic director at Minnesota.

Bill Brophy, another native Minnesotan who served as sports editor of the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, was a young boy in 1962. But he remembers.

“My dad took the train to Madison for the game,” Brophy says. “He was still mad a month later. He told me the story. He said Minnesota got screwed.”

The game had large implications — the winner would go to the Rose Bowl.

The Gophers led, 9–7, when the Badgers tried to mount a late fourth-quarter drive starting at their own 20-yard line. Three completions from Ron Vander Kelen ’64 to his star receiver, Pat Richter ’64, JD’71 (later UW athletic director), brought the ball to the Minnesota 43-yard line. Two and a half minutes to play.

The next play lives in infamy for Gopher fans. Vander Kelen was rushed and hit by Minnesota’s star defensive tackle, Bobby Bell. His wobbly pass was intercepted, and joyous Gopher fans began dreaming about Pasadena in January.

Except a 15-yard penalty was called on Bell for roughing the passer. And soon another 15 yards was tacked on for “unsportsmanlike remarks from the sidelines,” as Sports Illustrated put it.

Suddenly the Badgers were at the Minnesota 13-yard line. “We still had to take it in,” Richter recalls, 63 years later. “I’ve seen a lot of crazy calls in my life, but you have to play it as it is and execute.”

They scored three plays later, winning 14–9. Minnesota players and fans were outraged.

“I touched the ball,” Bell told Sports Illustrated. “It was a legitimate rush.”

Crazy calls, the introduction of a slab of bacon, then an axe, and a heated personality clash between two charismatic hockey coaches — the rivalry between Badgers and Gophers athletics has produced legends and lore for the ages.

“Badgers May Abolish Football”

Incredibly, the football series, which began in 1890 and will continue this year in Minneapolis on November 29, is currently dead even. Each team has won 63 games, and there have been eight ties.

In 2010, when the Big Ten Conference added Nebraska and went to two divisions in football, Minnesota and Wisconsin were split up. Though teams would be allowed a crossover game, some discussions of scheduling did not include a Gophers vs. Badgers matchup.

“I think both [then UW athletic director] Barry Alvarez and I said that a game had to happen,” recalls Maturi, who then led Gopher athletics. “I made the comment at a meeting, ‘If we don’t play each other, I’m going to get fired.’ ”

The game happened, and indeed, only once in the 135-year history of the rivalry did the Badgers and Gophers not meet on the football field.

What caused them not to play in 1906 was the culmination of a decade-plus rash of serious injuries that led some to question whether college football should continue.

News accounts from those early games tell the story. Reporting on the first Badgers-Gophers meeting, in November 1890 — won 63–0 by Minnesota — the Green Bay Weekly Gazette noted: “The usual number of accidents occurred during the game — Leary of the Minnesota team having his nose broken; of the UW men, Davidson sprained his ankle; Sumner was quite seriously injured by colliding with one of his opponents, and Kerr, the captain of the team, was seriously injured about the head in a collision. He protested that he was not seriously hurt and continued playing but finally fell unconscious and was carried off the field.”

By 1906, university faculty and administrators discussed doing away with the sport. A March 1906 Wisconsin State Journal headline read: “Badgers May Abolish Football.”

There was a mass student protest on campus. Football survived, but the Badgers-Gophers game was suspended, as a Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist explained in 1973: “The reason they didn’t play in 1906: college football with its mass formations had become too brutal. President Teddy Roosevelt ordered the colleges to suspend their most intense rivalries. … Roosevelt directed the rules committee to create a more open game. Thus the forward pass was introduced.”

An Axe and a Slab of Bacon

By 1930, the history and intensity of the Badgers-Gophers rivalry led a Minneapolis dentist named B. Fouch — a 1914 Minnesota alumnus — to create an unusual trophy.

Carved from black walnut, “it is two feet long and one foot wide,” the Star Tribune reported, “has a raised football in the center, the word ‘Bacon’ at each end, and the initial ‘M,’ reversible to a ‘W’ when the slab is hung the other way.”

UW Athletics

It became known as the “slab of bacon,” with the winner of the Badgers-Gophers football game gaining possession until the next meeting. It changed hands across a dozen years, and then, in 1943, the slab of bacon disappeared after a Gopher victory in Minnesota.

A Star Tribune article the Monday following the game said a Badgers manager had tried to present it in the Gophers’ locker room, only to be told “all trophies are frozen for the duration” of World War II.

The slab of bacon wasn’t seen again in public for 50 years, when it was unearthed in Madison in 1994 by a UW athletics intern cleaning a storage room. Oddly, it hadn’t been completely ignored. Somebody had written on it the scores of the Badgers-Gophers games from 1943 to 1970 in thick black marker, according to a 2023 New York Times series on college sports mysteries.

By the time the missing slab was discovered, the rivalry had another trophy: the Paul Bunyan Axe, donated by the Badgers’ National W Club. It was presented for the first time in Minneapolis in January 1949, at halftime of the Badgers-Gophers basketball game. Gopher football legend Francis “Pug” Lund accepted it, Minnesota having won the 1948 game 16–0.

Today’s tradition of the winning team feigning to chop down the goalposts with the axe did not happen immediately. Richter, who played in the early 1960s, said he and his teammates never swung the axe.

Minnesota sports historian Ryan Barland looked into the origin of the chopping and couldn’t pinpoint it precisely, noting that “the practice was started in the 1980s (at the earliest).”

The chopping is a big deal now. Andy Crooks ’08 was a high school All-State player in Wausau in the early 2000s prior to coming to the UW, where he first played linebacker, then tight end. Crooks always wanted to be a Badger, but his high school girlfriend’s parents were Gophers who serenaded him with the Minnesota fight song.

“That ‘Ski-U-Mah’ stuff,” Crooks says.

He wasn’t having it. Crooks arrived in Madison fully versed in the rivalry.

“There is not a better feeling,” he says, “than taking that axe and chopping those posts down. There’s nothing more disheartening than when a team runs across the field and takes [the axe] from you.”

The original Paul Bunyan’s Axe is now in possession of the College Football Hall of Fame, the W Club having replaced it in 2000.

An Upset and an Abdication

In a memorable 1961 game in Minneapolis, with a Rose Bowl bid on the line for Minnesota, the Badgers upset the Gophers, 23–21. Richter caught two touchdown passes, and Minnesota fans were furious.

The loss left the Ohio State Buckeyes with a better record than the Gophers. Remarkably, however, the Ohio State faculty voted 28–25 to reject the Rose Bowl bid.

A faculty member told Sports Illustrated: “We’re upset that the image of Ohio State is that the school is merely an appendage to the football team.”

There was a near riot in Columbus. Some 2,000 students “burned members of the faculty in effigy,” the magazine reported, “snake-danced down the main street, and surrounded the capitol building.” The bid went instead to Minnesota, and the Gophers won the 1962 Rose Bowl, 21–3, over UCLA.

From Ecstasy to Shambles

Even the fiercest rivalries have ebbs and flows, and for a time — a decade starting in 2004 — the football Badgers dominated the Gophers.

One game seems to particularly haunt Gopher fans. In 2005, in Minneapolis, the Gophers had the ball and a 34–31 lead with less than a minute to go. Forced to punt near their own end zone, the unthinkable happened. The Badgers blocked the punt and recovered the ball for a touchdown, securing a 38–34 Badgers win.

“It was a home game,” says Minnesota’s Barland, who was a Gopher student at the time. “We were beating our rivals. To go from that ecstasy to shambles was a foundational part of my college experience.”

Five years after the blocked punt, in October 2010, UW head football coach Bret Bielema drew the ire of Gopher fans when he had the Badgers go for a two-point conversion after taking a 41–16 lead with under seven minutes to play in Madison.

Was Wisconsin running up the score?

“A very poor decision,” Gophers coach Tim Brewster said afterward. “It was wrong.”

“We Bring Out the Best in Each Other”

The Badgers-Gophers rivalry has also been heated in both men’s and women’s hockey.

The NCAA sanctioned women’s hockey in 2000, and since then the Badgers have won eight national championships and the Gophers six.

Writing about the rivalry in 2019, the Star Tribune called it “fierce.” The occasion was the 2019 national championship game between the Badgers and Gophers. The Badgers won, 2–0, behind a 27-save performance by goaltender Kristen Campbell ’20.

Gophers coach Brad Frost said, “We bring out the best in each other.”

The all-time series in women’s hockey is nearly as close as that of football. When the Badgers and Gophers met last, in March 2025, in the semifinals of the Frozen Four, each team had 57 wins, and there had been 16 ties.

The Badgers won, 6–2, securing a one-win advantage in the border-battle series and going on to win their NCAA-record eighth national championship.

“They Hit You to Hate You”

The Badgers-Gophers rivalry in men’s ice hockey dates to 1922 (a two-game sweep by the Gophers), but from 1936 to 1964 they didn’t play, as Badger athletics discontinued hockey until November 1963.

The apex of the rivalry arrived in the following decade and centered on two larger-than-life head coaches.

Bob Johnson and Herb Brooks had much in common: both had played hockey for the Gophers, and both would coach the men’s hockey Olympic team. They were energetic, quotable, and terrific coaches. There was one more thing.

“History tells us they’re probably two of the greatest American coaches ever,” says sportswriter Brophy, who knew and covered them both. “But they truly didn’t like each other.” In the 1970s, Johnson coached the Badgers and Brooks the Gophers.

“I was struck with the level of dislike between the two programs,” Brophy says.

Mike Eaves ’78 was a star player for the Badgers team that won the 1977 NCAA championship. Eaves later coached the Badgers, and in 2002 he spoke to Capital Times sports columnist Joe Hart about the intensity of the Badgers-Gophers hockey rivalry.

Eaves described entering the Minneapolis arena as a player, taking the ice and thinking, “Holy moly, this is hate. … The tenacity on the ice was incredible. When they hit you, they hit you to hate you. It was special.”

In November 1977, eight months after the Badgers won the national title, the Gophers were coming to Madison for a two-game weekend series at the Dane County Coliseum. During the week, at a luncheon in Minneapolis, Brooks made a comment about the Badger hockey fans.

“They get about 8,000 people in there,” Brooks said, “and half of them are drunk.”

Word drifted back to Madison. Some enterprising Badger fans concocted a photo of Brooks sucking on a beer can and distributed copies to fans seated near the Gophers coach.

“There were hundreds of them being held up behind the bench,” Brophy says. “It got to Herb. After the game, in the area where Herb was doing his press conference, some kid from the band asked Herb to sign the photo. Herb grabbed the guy and threw him up against the wall. Then he cooled off. But it was like, ‘Wow!’ It was real. He really didn’t care for Wisconsin and Wisconsin didn’t care for him.”

Ironically, within a few years, Bob Johnson’s son, Mark ’94 — who now coaches the powerhouse Badgers women’s hockey team — would star on the 1980 Olympic “miracle” team that won the gold medal. Their coach? Herb Brooks.

Doug Moe ’79 is a longtime Wisconsin journalist and author.

Published in the Fall 2025 issue.

What about the Badgers-Gophers rivalry in men’s and women’s basketball?

Watch video highlights of the teams’ 2025 matchups below!