MADISON, Wis. – Wisconsin Athletic Director Barry Alvarez was never confident his football program would be able to resume football activities and its season this Saturday, but he was hopeful. The reports of the increasing number of positive coronavirus test results changed that optimism.

Alvarez and the University of Wisconsin announced Tuesday that the Badgers’ team-related football activities would remain paused indefinitely, forcing the cancelation of Saturday afternoon’s home game against Purdue.

“I felt we were doing the right things, we were getting our players isolated, putting them individually in rooms, we had a good plan and I was hopeful we could corral this and be where we wanted to be,” Alvarez told reporters over zoom Tuesday. “I was never overconfident. This virus has been fickle. It’s been inconsistent, and we haven’t been able to put our finger on it yet.”

It’s the second consecutive weekend the Badgers are forced to cancel a game, which will go down as another “no-contest” from the Big Ten.

Wisconsin remains outside the “red/red” category from the Big Ten that would require an automatic postponement of games and football-related activities, but Alvarez said the Badgers are experiencing new positive tests daily.

The Badger football team first paused team activities on Oct. 28 and its scheduled game at Nebraska on Oct. 31 was cancelled. Wisconsin hasn’t played since opening the season with a 45-7 victory over Illinois on October 23. Since then, 27 active coronavirus cases have emerged within the program. Over the last seven days (Oct. 27-Nov. 2), student-athletes (10) and staff (11) have registered a total of 21 positive tests.

There have been five (two staff and three student-athletes) positive COVID-19 PCR tests recorded since Saturday.

“Earlier in the week, I felt very confident that we were getting things under control, but in the last three days we’ve had 11 positives in the program,” said Alvarez, who added he had no depth concerns currently on the roster and that Wisconsin would have been able to field a team this weekend should they have played.

“It just didn’t feel as though we had our arms around it, had things controlled. Keep your priorities in order, the health and safety of our student athletes and staff is top priority.”

The only player/coach confirmed by Wisconsin to have a positive test is head coach Paul Chryst, although sourced reports have said offensive coordinator Joe Rudolph and quarterbacks Graham Mertz and Chase Wolf have the virus.

Alvarez said Wisconsin continues to do PCR and antigen testing to get a thorough scope of the outbreak and to try and contain it. The UW medical staff continues to locate where the virus came from but have yet to figure out the source. Former Badgers cornerback Troy Vincent, the Executive Vice President of Football Operations at the National Football League, forwarded Alvarez the NFL’s protocols on how the league is handling social distancing to help give Wisconsin some ideas.

“He wanted me to share it with Paul, with our doctors to see if there are some things we haven’t done, things that we could do better,” Alvarez said. “(Chryst) thought there were some really good things in there, but we’ll continue to work on (a plan) and continue to adjust how we meet, how we practice. I thought we had a very good plan on how to feed and players and how they go through the (food) line, but apparently we don’t have all the answers.”

Wisconsin Athletics plans to provide another update on Saturday, Nov. 7.

Now having a 2020 schedule reduced to only six games, the Badgers will need to play the remaining five games of their regular season in order to qualify for the Big Ten Championship. The other option is if the average number of conference games for the other 13 games falls below six, with the average rounded up or down to .50. then teams must play no fewer than two conference games below the average.

To this point, the only two Big Ten games canceled this season have been due to Wisconsin's coronavirus outbreak.

“Nobody wants to be on that field any more than I do, but I’m not going to lose track of priorities,” Alvarez said. “We don’t leave ourselves much wiggle room now, and we know that. Hopefully we can get this corralled and we can get back on the field and playing.”