Going long on Badger history

In early September, while the Badgers faced off against the Fighting Irish in the historic Shamrock Series game at Lambeau Field, a more collegial matchup was playing out in the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame.

For five days, the UW-Madison Libraries' UW Archives and the University of Notre Dame Archives formed their own team, welcoming nearly 7,000 fans of all athletic allegiances to their joint exhibit, From the Gridiron to the Archives: Documenting Over a Century of Notre Dame and Wisconsin, a display of rare objects from each university's archives. Using historical objects and memorabilia, the exhibit was designed to give a clearer picture of the people, places, and moments that defined the storied athletic programs over the last century.

The partnership to build the exhibit began in late 2025, when Katie Nash, university archivist and head of the UW Archives, was approached by Notre Dame sports archivist Gregory Bond with a proposal: Would the UW Archives like to collaborate on a once-in-a-lifetime exhibit displaying more than a century of Badger and Fighting Irish history in Titletown?

It would be a first-of-its-kind project for the UW Archives team. For Nash, it would also be too good to pass up.

"Yeah, this is a no-brainer," Nash recalls.

Teams assembled shortly after the initial proposal, and an archival supergroup of UW Archives, Hesburgh Libraries, and Packers Hall of Fame staff was formed in January 2026. The curatorial groups met monthly to provide resources, share discoveries, and map out physical spaces. By April, the focus of the exhibit started to take shape, the product of the group's close coordination and the supportive nature of archival work as a whole.

Independently, UW Archives staff navigated the Archives' 37,289 linear feet of physical collections - equivalent to more than 100 football fields lined up end zone to end zone - to find objects that would captivate and inspire sports fans and history buffs alike.

What made it to Lambeau was the result of three collective weeks of dedicated research by the UW Archives team: from the nearly 40,000 feet of physical collections, less than a linear foot of paper documents, including antique tickets and photographs, would make the trek northeast, accompanied by unearthed treasures that would bring greater dimension to the UW's remarkable athletic legacy.

Getting to know UW's greats

When curating the stories from an athletic program as storied as UW-Madison's, it's important to find focus.

"When we were first starting out, everything was on the table," says Mackenzie Ryan, assistant university records officer at the UW Archives. "To bring everything together, it was, 'What are things that are UW football related,' or better yet, 'What are those UW-Notre Dame connections?' Now we have some outlines, we know there's some prominent names that are both UW and Notre Dame."

Figures from the UW's deeper history with connections to Notre Dame immediately rose to the top: One was Walter Meanwell, a former UW basketball coach and athletic director. Another was the notorious "Kangaroo Kicker" Pat O'Dea, a UW fullback and football team captain who later went on to coach at Notre Dame for a single season in 1900.

Considered one of UW football's earliest stars, O'Dea also made headlines for his mysterious post-athletic journey: The star went missing in 1917, was presumed dead, and then returned to public life in 1934. Today, the tales of his athletic prowess continue to be celebrated. That includes his "kick that captivated a country," a 100-yard punt during the 1899 UW-Yale game that captured national media attention. The football O'Dea used to perform this impressive feat was one of the Gridiron exhibit's greatest highlights.

In between the flashier objects were records and correspondence that revealed the many ways - known or unknown - the teams' histories have intersected over the last century.

The long-forged relationship between the two universities' athletic programs was expressed in detail in Notre Dame's exhibit case. Vintage ads and student notecards from a coaching clinic operated by Meanwell and Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne revealed the depth of the two figures' working relationship, which lasted for years until the latter's death.

Other selections from the UW Archives were driven by the exhibit's location within the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame. There were photographs of figures like Charles "Buckets" Goldenberg, who led the NFL in touchdowns during his 1933 rookie season with the Packers, and former offensive tackle and current Badger and Packer broadcaster Mark Tauscher. In the main display, a letterman sweater worn by Eddie Jankowski stood proudly amid the tickets and trophies.

But the photograph of Howard "Cub" Buck represented the triangulation of the exhibit's three connections: a lineman at the University of Wisconsin from 1913-15, he was signed to the Green Bay Packers in 1921 by head coach and former Notre Dame star Curly Lambeau.

Getting lost to make discoveries

While the UW Archives made the task of exploring millions of records look easy, archival research presents a distinct set of challenges.

Archival holdings are organized differently from regular library materials, with items grouped into collections instead of cataloged individually like books or journals. Aging materials like century-old newspapers and yearbooks are often too fragile to be digitized, meaning keyword searches are out of the question. Researchers can explore these records via microfilm, but that work is time- and labor-intensive, requiring users to pore over tiny, inaccessible fonts and designs that feel almost hostile to the contemporary media consumer.

What remains is a tactile process that might involve days thumbing through file folders or taking magnifying glasses to gelatin silver photographs. Success isn't always guaranteed. With a collection the depth and size of the UW Archives' - that includes 2.5 million photographs, 4,500 audiovisual materials, 8,500 audio recordings, and 2,100 oral history interviews - even the experts are left to cross their fingers and hope for the best.

"In this type of research, you are going to these boxes, but I don't know what's in the box. It's like a treasure chest," says Ryan. "I roughly know the topic - these are chancellor's papers, or these are athletic board records … I'm opening that treasure chest and hoping there's gold inside."

Oftentimes success in archival research means knowing where to look and how. Tasked with the research project's deeper dives, Ryan relied on her insider knowledge of UW-Madison and its archives to unearth the most compelling pieces. That's how a chance flip through an archival collection vaguely entitled "Memorabilia," for example, led to the discovery of the 1944 Badger football tickets that made their way into the exhibit display.

Emblazoned with patriotic imagery and a diagram of Notre Dame Stadium, that particular ticket is a far cry from the digital tickets of today - less a means of entry and more a souvenir.

"Now tickets are on people's phones. There's very few paper tickets anymore," Nash says. "I think about the information that was on a ticket, in addition to just the interesting graphics and the colors that are used. It's an interesting artifact. It may not be information you can find anywhere else."

Hands on history

That, Nash says, is the core function of archives: taking materials of interest out of closets or from under beds and making them accessible to all.

Sometimes that's a tall order. Nash says she often encounters faculty or alumni who are sheepish about their unique items, assuming they won't appeal to future generations of researchers. That stack of student newspapers, that research paper, or, yes, even that classic Badger ticket, Nash assures, has a place in the university's history. "Once it arrives at UW Archives, that's when the entire world knows about it."

That's what made the From the Gridiron to the Archives exhibit such a particular thrill. Bringing those pieces of UW's history to the masses is the promise of the UW Archives writ large.

"It was incredibly powerful for us to connect with visitors and share the stories of these objects as we know them," Nash says. "The UW Archives are the keepers of UW history, so we love connecting people with items from the past that might be unknown or forgotten - and it helps to do that in a setting as iconic as Lambeau Field."

Stories from the Sidelines

The reality of archival research is that you'll always end up with new discoveries - even if they're not exactly what you're seeking. In researching the From the Gridiron to the Archives exhibit, the UW Archives team uncovered histories that didn't make it into the display cases at the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame. But the stories are too good not to tell.

Pat the Dog

For one year, from 1898 to 1899, a bulldog named Pat served as the official mascot for Wisconsin football. Named after notorious UW kicker Pat O'Dea, the pup was often seen parading Camp Randall's sidelines in his "W" blanket. He even earned the title of "hero."

This very good mascot's time on the sidelines was cut short tragically in 1899, when he was run over by a Milwaukee train. His triumphant story is captured very briefly on a placard affixed to a metal statue the Archives team found at UW Athletics during their research for the exhibit. But aside from the statue immortalizing the pup, little else remains of Pat's story.

What we do know: Pat is one in a long line of pre-Bucky mascots who cheered on the home team. During her research for the From the Gridiron exhibit, Ryan encountered documentation of all manner of mascots: live badgers, a human child, and even a monkey.

"These other kind of mascots didn't really catch on as much, or [in the case of Pat the dog], met very tragic fates, or were not long-term solutions, not sustainable," Ryan says, "just because you're having wild animals or you have this dog that apparently is just running loose."

Fifty years after Pat, Bucky would become the official UW mascot. It's further proof that you can't stop a Badger.

The Committee of Twenty-Five

In the early 1900s, college football was in crisis. Faculty at universities across the country had begun to question the role of football at institutions of higher education, calling it "barbaric."

"They really wanted to get rid of the football program," Ryan said. Even at UW-Madison.

In response, UW students formed in 1905 an organization called the Committee of Twenty-Five, which, according to a 1907 Badger yearbook, intended to "arouse, enliven and maintain the 'old Wisconsin spirit'" by maintaining sports at the University of Wisconsin.

The committee landed on Ryan's radar when the archivists at Hesburgh Libraries found a letter in their archives asking Notre Dame's president, Rev. John W. Cavanaugh, for his opinion on collegiate football.

"The archives team were like, 'Do you guys have anything? Is there a deeper connection here?'" Ryan says.

Brief mentions of the committee appear in The Daily Cardinal and Badger yearbook, and posters hoping to drum up fan support and excitement can be found in the Archives' holdings. But there's little else to be found about the committee online.

That means there's work to be done: "I would love to write about it," Ryan says.