Everybody there wanted to be second string. Nobody wanted to start, they just wanted to go through college on scholarship and play once in a while....

Barry Alavarez, the head football coach at Wisconsin since 1990 retires today and he leaves a program in very good shape. When he started there 15 years ago he inherited a losing tradition with a few very good starting players and the rest non-achievers. He put every position up for grabs and found nobody on the team really wanted to grab a starting job. He didn't change the inner selves of very many players, he didn't just walk in there and take a bunch of institutional losers and turn them into winners; he had to bring winners into the program. He started with coaches who had been with other winning programs, he didn't have one that hadn't either been on a conference champion or a National Champion.

His kids were such a bunch of losers that they thought they were being punished when told they had to work out. He pulled the scholarships of a ton of them and the ones that remained got strong. How strong? Well they went 1-10 during Alvarez first season, but there is a thing about that very physical game called "losing right," meaning even when you lose you keep hitting, keep trying, and don't take cheap shots when the game is out of hand.

Alvarez won the Big Ten Championship and the Rose Bowl his third year on the job with kids who wanted to win before they got there. He leaves Wisconsin with a ton of kids who want to win. A job well done.

A lesson for all of us: we have to want to win. Period.