Last week Badger fans were all atwitter because the basketball team was playing Duke in the Big Ten/ACC Challenge, and the football team was playing for the Big Ten championship and a possible football playoff berth.

Instead, the Badgers lost to Duke (though they rebounded somewhat by beating Marquette Saturday) and were annihilated by Ohio State, 59-0.

(I saw neither game because I was announcing college basketball both nights. That was certainly a better use of my time Saturday, even with the 2.5-hour bus-flat-tire delay. And on Wednesday, the team I announced for won.)

I’m not particularly bothered by the Duke loss because Duke is good, and the Badgers aren’t playing that well, even though Wednesday was their first loss. Basketball teams don’t want to peak in December, and a loss to a power like Duke doesn’t hurt you much.

A lot of people are bothered by Saturday night’s nationally televised embarrassment, as Todd Milewski chronicles:

These are not the words you want associated with your team in a championship game:

Torched. Horrific. Embarrassed. Mismatch.

Yet that’s some of the wrath that was heaped upon Wisconsin after its worst loss in a generation, a 59-0 humbling by Ohio State in Saturday’s Big Ten championship game in Indianapolis.

It tied for the second-worst losing margin in program history, set in another 59-0 loss to Ohio State in 1979. Back then, however, the Badgers were unranked and headed for a 4-7 season under second-year coach Dave McClain while the Buckeyes were ranked sixth in the country.

(For the record, the Badgers’ worst loss was a 63-0 drubbing by Minnesota in 1890, the program’s second season.)

On Saturday, the Badgers were four-point favorites, but Ohio State made a statement to the College Football Playoff selection committee how much it wants to be part of the four-team lineup.

Put it this way: Ohio State had as many points at halftime Saturday night (38) as the Wisconsin men’s basketball team allowed all game against Marquette earlier in the day.

The reviews, naturally, were not kind.

Jeff Potrykus of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “To be blunt, UW won the pregame coin toss and the Buckeyes dominated from there.”

Vinnie Duber of CSNChicago.com: “Ohio State poured an avalanche of points on Wisconsin in a hurry to start the game, and the hole was massive by the time the Badgers could catch their breath.”

Patrick Vint of SBNation.com: “If the Big Ten West wanted to show that it belonged with its storied brethren in the East, it did not get far Saturday. The Badgers had won a de facto Big Ten West tournament over the season’s last three weeks, systematically knocking off Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota to lock up the division title. Whether it was exhaustion from those three previous games or just another instance of Wisconsin not showing up for half of a game, it did the Badgers, and the Big Ten West, no favors.”

Selfless decision by CFP selection committee member/Wisconsin AD Barry Alvarez to instruct his school to tank and boost B1G playoff hopes.

— Pat Forde (@YahooForde) December 7, 2014

Goodbye Heisman Trophy. Goodbye B1G Championship. Hello Gary Anderson criticism. The Badgers should be embarrassed.#Pitiful

— Bill Michaels (@Bill_Michaels) December 7, 2014

Sports Illustrated’s Brian Hamilton: “The defense chopped Wisconsin into pieces, but in an added indignity, it saddled Melvin Gordon with the antitheses of a Heisman moment: A second-quarter fumble by the Badgers’ 2,000-yard tailback was returned for a touchdown by the Buckeyes’ Joey Bosa. That put the score at 38-0 and left Gordon to contemplate how he’ll applaud politely while Oregon’s Marcus Mariota hoists the trophy next weekend.”

This was unfortunately predictable. I thought the oddsmakers had lost their minds by making Wisconsin a favorite Saturday, regardless of whom the Buckeyes had at quarterback.

One reason I never root for Big Ten teams, and especially Ohio State and Michigan, in bowl games is because of the depressing regularity of such hammerings at the hands of the Buckeyes and Wolverines and their pond scum coaches, Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler. That was in the days when the Big Ten was known as the Big Two and the Little Eight. Each year I hoped that the host site of the Michigan-OSU game would be nuked, and, failing that, that the Wolverines and Buckeyes would lose their bowl games and their planes would crash on the way home.

Notice that the previous paragraph includes no admission that maybe there were valid reasons for Bucky’s getting crushed by better teams — you know, better players. Those games were in the ’70s, when UW was worse than mediocre (just two winning seasons from 1970 to 1979) but not as bad as as the BADgers were in the late ’80s under Don Mor(t)on. That changed thanks to reductions in scholarship limits by the NCAA, as well as high school football players wanting to play immediately instead of waiting their turn, or never getting into a game except in garbage time.

One wonders how a defense gets to be rated second in the country when that defense gives up 59 points. (Though the defense gave up 52; the offense gave up seven on the return of Gordon’s fumble. Doesn’t that make you feel better?) As with many teams that run the ball well, the Badgers can stop the run, but pass defense is a bigger problem.

Truth be told, though, games like this between good teams happen with increasing frequency because of the increase in speed, and coaches’ being willing to exploit their offensive speed. (Time was when coaches always put their better athletes on defense, leading to a lot of boring 7-3 games.) Recall two years ago when Wisconsin blasted Nebraska 70-31 in the 2012 Big Ten championship game, or UW’s win over the Cornhuskers earlier this season.

The bigger issue to me — which exposes an issue that has been a problem for a long, long time — is how a team with a supposed Heisman Trophy candidate running back gets shut out. That suggests an inability to figure out how to move the ball down the field beyond handing off to your tailback. The fact that UW was able to beat lesser teams (other than Northwestern) and teams roughly their talent level (Nebraska and Minnesota) doesn’t mean this team doesn’t have serious deficiencies on offense. Apparently this offensive staff lacks the ability of previous offensive staffs (that is, those with Paul Chryst as the offensive coordinator) to maximize their strengths and disguise what they were doing — run the same plays but from different formations and pre-snap looks.

At the risk of offending Darlington Redbirds fans: Alex Erickson is not a number one wide receiver in the Big Ten, and he was obviously the best receiver (who played quarterback in high school) the Badgers had. As I wrote here earlier this season, the question of who should have played quarterback, Joel Stave or Tanner McAvoy, was correctly answered with one word: Neither. Neither Stave nor McAvoy should be the quarterback, though there is no guarantee that freshman D.J. Gillins or the supposedly bazooka-armed quarterback from Utah will be the answer behind center either.

Games like Saturday’s also makes you think that coach Gary Andersen’s recruiting approach isn’t working in other areas too. This year’s defense was supposed to be smaller but quicker than previous defenses. Giving up that many points means you have defensive problems. The traditionally strongest position grouping has been the offensive line, but on at least one night they couldn’t block, period, and their pass blocking has been a question beyond Saturday night.

Is this overreacting to one bad game? Or is a season like this — beat the teams you should, but never get better than that — as good as it gets at Camp Randall? The answer comes down to not wins and losses, but money. Andersen won’t be in trouble unless fans start coming up with something else to do besides go to Badger games. (Which is also why hockey coach Mike Eaves is in trouble.)