How Beating Wisconsin Changed Husky Football Forever

On a gloriously sunny afternoon at the 1960 Rose Bowl, witnessed by a crowd of 100,809 including Vice President Richard Nixon and an NBC-TV national audience watching from home, the Huskies not only beat the Badgers, they annihilated them.

"I think we were 15- to 20-point underdogs," said the late UW coach Jim Owens, who was 82 when he died in 2009. "I knew we were ready to play, but it was a surprise. It was a big upset. It was well executed."

The spread actually was 6.5 points, but for many reasons it felt far greater.

This New Year's Day game would mark the turning point of college football perceptions everywhere in which Midwest teams were considered far superior to all comers, especially to those on the West Coast.

The Big Ten entered that 1960 Rose Bowl having won 12 of the 13 games, many by blowout margins, after it agreed to play Pacific Coast Conference opponents from a league later known as the AAWU, Pac-8, Pac-10 and Pac-12.

For that matter, the Huskies previously had lost 16 of 22 games since it began playing Big Ten teams in 1936, again many of them by embarrassing margins.

"Everything I called that day, and everything we did, worked," said Husky quarterback Bob Schloredt, who shared Rose Bowl MVP honors with running back George Fleming. "We took the heart out of them."

As the Big Ten champs, Wisconsin entered the game 7-2 and was No. 6 in the Associated Press poll, while the UW was 9-1 and ranked eighth.

The outcome would represent the Huskies' first bowl victory after losing three times and tying once at the Rose Bowl.

The UW would win the 1961 Rose Bowl, as well, upsetting No. 1-ranked Minnesota 17-7.

And eventually, the Huskies and the rest of the West would turn the tables in terms of superiority and win 16 of 18 Pasadena games from the Big Ten in 1970-87, with the UW supplying two of those victories.

The UW takedown of Wisconsin was incredibly strong-handed.

The Huskies scored on their second offensive series, capping a methodical 10-play, 49-yard drive with Don McKeta's 6-yard touchdown run.

One play later, the Badgers fumbled the ball, which set up the versatile Fleming's 26-yard field goal and it was 10-0 just like that.

On the final play of the first quarter, Fleming, who later played for the AFL's Oakland Raiders and became a Washington state congressman, returned a Wisconsin punt 53 yards for a dazzling score that made it 17-0.

The guys with the red W's on the front of their helmets could only dive at Fleming and miss all day long.

"That had to be the biggest game of my career," said Fleming, who was 83 when he died in 2021. "That game put people on notice about George Fleming."

After the UW spotted Wisconsin its lone touchdown in the second quarter, Fleming returned a punt 55 yards to the Badgers 27. That set up Schloredt's 23-yard scoring pass to tight end Lee Folkins, whose NFL career path would be determined by that play.

"He was between the goal posts and I hit right in the hands and he made a terrific catch, a fingertip catch," said Schloredt, who was 79 when he died in 2019. "Folkins said he signed with the Green Bay Packers because of that catch."

In the second half, UW fullback Ray Jackson powered in for a 2-yard touchdown plunge, Schloredt scored on a 3-yard run and backup receiver Don Millich caught a 1-yard TD pass, and the New Year's Day damage was done.

Though it wasn't the Big Ten, Owens himself previously had been part of dominant Midwest football teams, as a tight end playing for an Oklahoma powerhouse program that won the 1949 and 1950 Sugar Bowls for a legendary leader.

"My coach Bud Wilkinson called me a few days after the game and said that was the finest prepared and executed 60 minutes he had ever seen in a bowl game, no matter who was out on the field," he said. "Everyone was going 100 percent. They knocked Wisconsin on their heels and they never recovered."

Most telling from that afternoon so long ago, those previously unwashed Huskies now play in the Big Ten alongside the Badgers, for two years now, considered more than worthy of conference membership.