For obvious reasons, last weekend was not a very good one if you're a die-hard fan of all things Wisconsin sports. Reasons which I swore I would never talk about again, and I will uphold that pledge in my column here today. But lately, after what occured at Lambeau on Sunday, I'm beginning to ask myself if these disappointments are even surprising anymore. Are we really surprised when the Packers can't defend their home turf in one of their biggest regular season games of all-time? Are we really surprised that the Brewers came nowhere near the playoffs this season after getting our hopes up last year? And are we really that surprised when the Bucks dominated the Bulls for most of the game on Tuesday night only to blow it at the end (and that's assuming you still care about the Bucks). Unfortunately, the answer has become that we're not really surprised by any of this, and in fact, it's almost as if we are getting to the point where we expect these things to happen.

Now, I really don't want to turn this into a column where I'm a Debbie Downer and I rip on everything that I love. And I don't want this to turn into one of those "State of Wisconsin Sports" that you might see written in a half-assed manner by the sports editor in your local paper around the time of the Presidential State of the Union Address. All that this column is meant to be is a simple declaration that I'm sick of feeling the way I felt last Sunday after the Packers lost. I'm sick of guys like Michael Strahan saying, "Midwestern fans are nice. If Favre does well as a Viking, those nice fans are going to be conflicted." Nice? That's the best term you can come up with to describe us? Nice isn't good. Nice doesn't win football games. Nice doesn't win championships. Nice teams finish last.

The biggest thing that this state is missing as far as sports go is a sense of swagger. We have dashes of it here and there, but Brandon Jennings having three good games and the Packers have a good preseason doesn't count as having swagger. This state's sports scene is missing what I call the "More Cowbell Factor", a factor in direct correlation to the popular Will Ferrell Saturday Night Live sketch. If not familiar, I offer you a refresher.

What I mean is that while "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult is a great song, it's nowhere near great until you add that cowbell. That instrument helps gives that song that extra oomph, that extra swagger, that extra ingredient, all to help it become one of the great musical rock ballards of all-time (note: previous sentence may be an exaggeration). That's what Wisconsin is missing. There's no swagger, there's no cowbell.

The biggest problem with Wisconsin sports these days is that we already know what we're getting with our teams before the season even starts, because the teams we root for have become so stale and predictable. The Brewers? They'll start off hot, have a great May, stumble in the summer and come up short in the end. The Packers? They'll either win one playoff game and lose the second, or they'll go under .500. The Bucks? Last place in the Central, of course. The Badgers football team? They'll beat the mid-majors, lose to the big boys in the Big Ten, beat up on the scrubs of the Big Ten, but finish well enough to lose a bowl game to the 4th place team from the SEC. The Badgers hoops team? They'll start the season unranked, play well throughout the season, get a five-seven seed in the tournament, and then lose in the second round. It's all been there done that right now, and I'd like a little more unpredictability in our teams. But we're not going to change any of this until the entire culture of Wisconsin sports changes. Here's five things that need to be achieved.

1. We need better coaches.

How your team plays is ultimately a reflection of your coach, and if your coach is mediocre than your team is going to be mediocre. Of all the coaches in Wisconsin, I only think that two of them are the right fit for their teams. Scott Skiles and Bo Ryan. Bo Ryan knows how to get a lot of mileage out of a car even when the tank is on empty, and that's what he's been with the Badgers for quite some time. Scott Skiles bring a no-nonsense attitude to the Bucks that will at least have them playing hard even though their roster needs an absolute overhaul. For now, those two get a reprieve from me.

The other coaches though, they can be replaced. I am a huge Mike McCarthy guy, but that's more because I want to like him rather than I actually do like him. At times, I feel McCarthy outcoaches himself and worries too much about failure to actually succeed (both Vikings games being a perfect example of that). McCarthy seems to always be waiting for tomorrow, as if things will get fixed the next day, or the day after that. I think he needs to stop being so soft, and get more intense. Maybe somewhere along the lines of a Bill Cowher is what I'd like to see out of him, or out of a Packers coach in general. Someone that has an edge to them, a swagger, rather than someone who always looks like he just ate a bad brick of cheese.

As for Ken Macha, he's alright, but at times I just feel like he's a more successful version of Ned Yost. Too often last season I found myself comparing him to Yost than I did being impressed with the way he managed. He's another guy that is just a little too soft-spoken for me, and I think that the young Brewers team would be better suited to have a more outgoing manager than some Grandpa babysitting Dale Sveum in the dugout.

And Bret Bielema, well, he's got an Iowa Hawkeyes tattoo, so yeah, he can be replaced.

2. We need more star athletes.

Not only do we need more power at the coaching position, but we need more guys that are going to turn heads on the field and on the court. We need guys like Brandon Jennings, guys who have already brought more credibility to the Bucks in three NBA games than Michael Redd has since he's been here. We need guys like Greg Jennings and Donald Driver, guys who are electric both on and off the field. Guys like Prince Fielder, who can change any game with one swing of the bat, and gives a Brewers a legitimate force in the lineup. I guess you could throw Ryan Braun in there too, as long as we all agree that he'd be a huge douchebag if he wasn't on the Brewers. We also need more guys like Dwayne Wade at Marquette, and it'd be nice to actually know who some of the players on the Badgers were before the first game of each season, in both football and basketball. I mean, I can only be so excited for Keaton Nankivil. We need stars, we need playmakers, we need attitude. I campaigned hard for both Warren Sapp and Randy Moss when the Packers were flirting with them because of the star power they would have brought to the state. But instead we got Ryan Pickett and Duke Preston, so whatever.

3. We need to stop living in the past.

Being great is such a rare thing in Wisconsin that we often end up rooting for losers years after the memories should have faded away. You would have thought the 1982 Brewers swept the World Series three years in a row they way they are loved in Milwaukee, and hopefully we aren't looking at the 2008 team with the same eyes twenty years down the road. The 2001 Bucks "should have" won the Eastern Conference Finals and won the NBA championship so much to the point that it's like we pretend that they did. The Packers actually did have a solid team in the 1990's, but winning only one Super Bowl with Brett Favre in his prime is a major disappointment. We've only won one major title in the last thirty years, let's stop celebrating the losers.

Still disagree with me that we live in the past? How many of your friends houses have a replica football for the 1994 Rose Bowl Badgers in their home (guilty)? How many times do you still see "1996 NFC Central Champions" sweatshirts during NFL Sundays? How many of us sport the old ball and glove Brewers logo on our hats rather than the current logo (guilty again)? Unless something changes, the better days have been behind us, and we're all too well aware of it.

4. Conversely, we need to care more about the present.

I understand that Packers season tickets cost like $30,000 these days with seat licenses and everything, but we need to put the home back in home-field advantage. Sure, Lambeau was electric last weekend, but there was still way too much purple there as many Packers fans made the quick buck instead of making Lambeau as intimidating as can be. We need to start gobbling up tickets to Miller Park sooner, so that Milwaukee doesn't become Chicago North whenever the Cubs come to town. And as much as the live NBA experience might suck, we need to at least fill up the Bradley Center to the point that there still will be a Bucks team in Milwaukee five years from now.  

5. But ultimately, we might need to lower our expectations.

I guess this points contradicts everything I'm trying to say, but as I sit here and gripe about Wisconsin sports, I have to at least be thankful that at least things aren't any worse. Sure, the Bucks are predicted to only win on nights when the other team is missing their entire starting five due to injury, but at least things aren't as bad for us as they are for teams like the Washington Nationals or the Detroit Lions. At least our teams can stay somewhat competitive, and not be a complete cupcake on our opponents schedules. At least things aren't worse.

But I guess that kind of is my point. Instead of thinking like McCarthy and playing not to lose, we as a state need to start taking more risks and start doing what it takes to becoming champions. Look at a city like Boston, a city which has seen their baseball, football, and basketball teams win major championships within the last five years. Could you even imagine if the Brewers, Bucks, and Packers all won a championship within the next five years? If we lived in a state were our teams were so consistently good that it wouldn't be as rare as Halley's Comet to see the Bucks have a nationally televised game? If we lived in a state where our teams were actually predicted to win championships because they were actually good, and not just because they had one good game against the Arizona Cardinals in August? I can't even imagine anything like that happening, because that's not what I've come to expect. We expect mediocrity, and I think it's time that changes. Because if I'm not mistaken, this state has a fever, and the only prescription is More Cowbell.

And yes, the only reason I chose the More Cowbell theme for my filler of a column this week was so that I could show off this picture of me rocking the More Cowbell costume for Halloween. I also wanted to show off my treasure trail to any of the fine ladies reading out there this week. By the way, how is that when I go out dressed up like a normal person, girls won't talk to me even if I were to buy them drinks for the whole night, but when I go out dressed up like this vagabond, I am a modern day Casanova (note: previous sentence may also be an exaggeration).

See you in my Flash Forward...