The Wisconsin Badgers throttled Illinois in their season opener on Friday night, as redshirt freshman quarterback Graham Mertz became a national sensation with his incredible play against the Illini. Mertz completed 20 of his 21 pass attempts (including his first 17 in a row) for 248 yards and five touchdowns in a 45-7 rout of Illinois, and after Minnesota got blown out at home by Michigan, the Badgers appeared to be the clear frontrunners once again in the Big Ten West.
However, on Monday, word emerged that Mertz and backup Chase Wolf had both tested positive for COVID-19 in antigen testing and were awaiting confirmation by way of the more accurate PCR test. That confirmation arrived on Tuesday for Mertz, per CBS’ Dennis Dodd and ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg, putting him in the Big Ten’s COVID protocol that will keep him out for 21 days as he must test negative and then undergo testing for various potential effects of the virus, including myocarditis. The first concern is for the health of Mertz, who is a budding star with a bright future ahead of him both in college football and potentially the NFL.
For Wisconsin as a team, they will face Nebraska, Purdue, and then Michigan the next three weeks and be, potentially, down to their fourth string quarterback. Mertz was starting because Jack Coan, last year’s starter, suffered a foot injury in practice and is out indefinitely, and if Wolf’s test likewise is confirmed, they would have to turn to fourth-stringer Danny Vanden Boom, a redshirt junior with an objectively incredible name, for the next three weeks, pending Mertz and Wolf passing all of the Big Ten’s tests to return to action later.
The Big Ten schedule is very condensed with very little wiggle room, as there are no byes in the eight-game conference schedule, and as such, there’s not an opportunity to simply postpone a game or two even in the circumstance of Wisconsin being without almost the entirety of its quarterback depth chart. The hope was to avoid such situations, particularly at such a key position, but it serves as a reminder of the reality that the pandemic is still very real and once again we’re seeing a spiking case count in the U.S. seven months in.