The Packer football season begins in Seattle tonight, but you knew that.

The Badger football season started in Houston Saturday night, but you knew that too.

I predicted an LSU win over Wisconsin because the Tigers are not an opponent Wisconsin is ready to play. It’s one thing to look good for a half; it’s quite another to finish, and the Badgers certainly didn’t.

The loss prompted some pretty wild sturm und drang throughout e-Badgerland. There has been speculation that running back Melvin Gordon didn’t play much in the second half because he demanded that Joel Stave replace Tanner McEvoy at quarterback. (Gordon later was reported to have a hip injury, which appears to have come as news to Gordon.) The point is moot given that Stave apparently still has an injured shoulder … except that, as we now know, Stave doesn’t have an injured shoulder; he has the football quarterback version of the golf putting “yips,” or Steve Sax Disease. (For younger readers: Sax was a second baseman who developed a strange problem throwing from second base to first. Former center fielder Dale Murphy started his career as a catcher but got moved to the outfield because he couldn’t throw the ball back to the pitcher.)

I even read a Facebook friend compare Badgers coach Gary Andersen to Don Mor(t)on, quite possibly the worst UW coach of any sport in history, if not the worst coach of any sport in history. One way Andersen does not compare to Mor(t)on is that Andersen passed up Mor(t)on’s career win mark, six, last season, and he got UW to a bowl game, something you can guess without researching that Mor(t)on was unable to do.

There is one similarity between Mor(t)on and Andersen that is potentially troubling. Mor(t)on, you’ll recall if your mind remembers traumatic things, came to Madison with the veer option offense. The option used to be the kind of offense a coach would install if he lacked players for a more conventional offense — that is, big and/or fast players. The service academies have used the option because their players are usually small (offensive line-size players don’t fit into cockpits of fighter jets), but disciplined. Mor(t)on had coached the veer (two split running backs) option at North Dakota State and for two seasons at Tulsa, and figured it would fit in just fine in the Big Ten, once he got option quarterbacks and smaller but quicker linemen.

Somewhere along the way to Mor(t)on’s master plan, UW got flattened, of course. (The fact the BADgers had terrible defensive players didn’t help. Today’s UW–Whitewater team probably would have beaten the late ’80s BADgers teams without too much trouble.) Fans forgot that former UW coach Dave McClain came from Ball State to Madison running the option, too. McClain, however, junked the option after he replaced an option quarterback, Jess Cole (who engineered wins over Michigan and Ohio State in 1981), with Notre Dame transfer Randy Wright, a drop-back passer, and went to a more conventional offense. Perhaps they figured Mor(t)on would realize the error of ways and change his mind about the veer. Mor(t)on didn’t, though he really didn’t get the chance to decide since UW chancellor Donna Shalala hit the eject button on his career after three wretched seasons.

Andersen does not run the veer, and the Badgers have been incorporating more option elements before Andersen arrived in Madison. (For evidence, look at the 2012 Big Ten championship game, Bret Bielema’s last as UW coach.) So have, for that matter, other Big Ten teams, notably Ohio State.

The fear someone still ticked off about Saturday’s game mentioned earlier this week is that Andersen will revamp the roster for players to run his kind of offense, fail and get fired, leaving behind, as when Barry Alvarez arrived in 1990, a roster full of players incapable of playing in the Big Ten. If you forgot Mor(t)on, and no one would blame you if you had, look east to Michigan, which hired Rich Rodriguez from West Virginia for his offense. Rodriguez blew up the Michigan roster, and then Rodriguez got fired after three seasons and a 15–22 record. (It’s amazing Bo Schembechler didn’t jump out of his grave and shoot Rodriguez for what Rodriguez did to Michigan football. Before Rodriguez’s first season, 2008, the last Michigan coach to have a losing record in any season was Bump Elliott, in 1967. Arguably Michigan is still recovering from Rodriguez.)

That assumes in part that the offense Andersen replaced was great. It wasn’t. UW hasn’t really recovered from the loss of former offensive coordinator Paul Chryst, who managed to confuse, through formations and motion, opposing defenses enough that the standard running plays UW has been running since Alvarez work much better. With the exception of the two seasons Scott Tolzien and Russell Wilson were UW’s quarterbacks, the forward pass has been about option number 10 in Madison for as long as anybody can measure. The Badgers have gotten decent quarterback play from Wright, Darrell Bevell, Brooks Bollinger, Jim Sorgi and John Stocco, but other than Tolzien’s and especially Wilson’s single seasons, the quarterback position should be renamed Handoff Specialist at UW. Wilson is the best quarterback UW has ever had, and he was in Madison for one season.

It’s not as if UW is ever going to emulate Texas Tech under Mike Leach. But you have to have a quarterback who can win, not merely not lose. Andersen is apparently trying to recruit two-way quarterbacks, who can run the option and throw. To me, the most important part of the quarterback position at any level is the ability to pass, not run, because there are between one and three running backs available to run at any time. There are quarterbacks who can pass well, and there are quarterbacks who can run well. Getting one who can do both well is hard enough, and well nigh impossible at Running Back U because of UW’s history of running the football to the exclusion of everything else.

The fault, of course, is not merely behind center; it is the fact that, dating back to the days of Lee DeRamus (that would be the 1994 Rose Bowl team, young fans), the Badgers have had one, and only one, capable wide receiver at a time. Apparently whoever has been successfully teaching UW offensive linemen to steamroll defenses hasn’t been teaching UW offensive linemen how to pass-block either.

I admit to having never played nor coached football, but if I were a defensive coordinator coaching against Wisconsin, my strategy would be to line up everybody between tackle and tight end(s), with the exception of one cornerback per split-out receiver, and dare UW to throw the football. That was basically LSU’s second-half strategy, and you’ll notice that after UW got its 24–7 lead, the scoreboard operator’s job was half-done for the night.

If the question is who should be the Badger quarterback, McEvoy or Stave, the correct answer is: No. Dan Dierdorf, then of ABC-TV’s Monday Night Football, once looked at the Detroit Lions’ three-quarterback shuffle and proclaimed, “If you have three quarterbacks, then you really have no quarterbacks.” And that is where UW is. Neither McEvoy nor Stave are Big Ten-quality quarterbacks. Neither, apparently, is Bart Houston, temporarily elevated to backup with Stave’s issues, and previous history suggests there’s no reason to think freshman D.J. Gillins is either.

The good news is that UW will become bowl-eligible merely by showing up the rest of the season. Eight wins is the floor for this team given its rather easy schedule the rest of the way, and they could win up to three more toss-up games — at Northwestern, home against Nebraska, and at Iowa. In most of those games it really won’t matter who lines up behind center — hand off to a running back, and UW will overwhelm whoever is in the way. That is not, however, a recipe for long-term success, once a UW opponent figures out that if you stop the run, you stop the Badgers.

Which brings us to tonight and the Packers. Readers know that there are really two separate NFL seasons — the regular season and the postseason. The postseason can wait; the regular season starts tonight with, most likely, a Packer loss, since Seattle is one of the most difficult places to play in the NFL.

The question going into this season is whether the Packers have fixed the defensive problems that have plagued them since Super Bowl XLV. Losing B.J. Raji won’t help, though getting Julius Peppers did. It’s reasonable to conclude that Peppers will be energized by playing for a winning organization and will have a good year this year, though beyond that is an open question.

The one thing that’s pretty certain is that the Packers have more than enough offense, even with questions at tight end. The upside of losing quarterback Aaron Rodgers for several games last year is that the Packers found a running game with running back Eddie Lacy. But championships are won with defense, and whether going smaller and quicker is preferable to big and slow (i.e. Raji at defensive end, Ryan Pickett) remains to be seen, and the answer may not come tonight.

I look at the schedule and see an 11–5 record. Their home schedule looks more difficult than their road schedule, with the Patriots and Falcons coming to Green Bay on consecutive weeks, vs. a likely loss in New Orleans. That will probably be enough to win the NFC North given that there are no other Super Bowl contenders out of that group.