For the better part of six quarters, the University of Wisconsin football team has looked fabulous. Worthy of a Top 10 ranking. Capable of achieving special things this season.

The other two quarters? Well, not so much.

In fact, if the Badgers played the way they did in the second quarter last week against Akron and in the first quarter Saturday against Marshall, they'd have a tough time staying afloat in the non-BCS conferences their first two opponents belong to.

That UW has gotten away with two awful quarters and still finds itself, in coach Bret Bielema vernacular, 1-0 multiplied by two says a lot about the Badgers' ability to respond to adversity -- and just how much more talented they are than the teams that have visited Camp Randall Stadium the past two Saturdays.

Speaking of 1-0, UW's ability to turn a two-touchdown deficit into a 51-14 throttling of Marshall before another sellout crowd gave Bielema a golden opportunity to open his postgame news conference with another one of his favorite sayings.

"Some of you guys might be taking lines with what I'm going to open up with, but it's not what happens during the course of the game; it's how you react to it," he said. "I think our guys defined that today."

If you're tired of hearing Bielema use that line, join the club. Now imagine how many times his players have heard it -- during meetings, during pregame speeches, during halftime pep talks. "It's not like '1-0' sickening," senior linebacker DeAndre Levy said, "but ... "

But they've heard it a bunch. So much so that they didn't need to hear it Saturday to know how to react when Marshall took a 14-0 lead early in the second quarter after dominating both sides of the ball for the first 16-plus minutes of the game.

"Really at that point, you can just keep doing what you're doing," senior right tackle Eric Vanden Heuvel said, "or you can really get after it and not accept what's going on."

UW chose the latter, scoring on five consecutive possessions to take control of the game. After being outgained 100-25 in total yardage in the first quarter, the Badgers held a 462-214 edge the rest of the way.

"They took our manhood at the end of the game," Marshall coach Mark Snyder said. "They're good at that. They started pounding us at the end of the game. We got beat up a whole lot."

Of course, the Badgers couldn't have gotten to that point without a passing attack that would have made Texas Tech proud. So much for the comparisons to UW's 1998 Rose Bowl team: Mike Samuel was a gritty quarterback, but he couldn't pass a lick. Allan Evridge proved he was more than just a game manager who can hand the ball off 63 times, as he did against Akron.

"We didn't throw because we couldn't (last week), we threw because we didn't have to," said Evridge, who bounced back from a shaky start to throw for 308 yards and a touchdown against Marshall. "I think people can see that."

Fresno State, UW's next opponent, sure will when it takes a look at the Badgers on film. The Bulldogs will see a team that rushed for over 400 yards one week and passed for over 300 the next.