Some rivalries simmer. Others boil.

The rivalry between the Wisconsin Badgers' and Minnesota Golden Gophers' football programs reached a boiling point last year and has not subsided.
UW coach Bret Bielema ushered in a new era of the rivalry after his team's 41-34 victory in the Metrodome, with the memorable line, "You want a rivalry? You got one."

It was a game that featured plenty of trash talking, skirmishes and Bielema's peculiar dash to the middle of the field to shake the hand of Golden Gophers coach Tim Brewster.

Minnesota wide receiver Eric Decker set the tone when he punched then-Badgers cornerback Jack Ikegwuonu in the groin midway through the second quarter.

Clint Brewster, the coach's son who is no longer on the team but was a redshirt quarterback at the time and didn't play in the game, engaged in some trash talking with then Badgers kicker Taylor Mehlhaff.

Mehlhaff missed two field-goal attempts in the second quarter and said afterward that Clint Brewster came up to him after the game and asked how many field goals he missed.

Much of that extra spice seems to have been added since Brewster became the Gophers' coach last season. He didn't hesitate this week to label the Badgers as his team's biggest rival.

"It's an important rivalry game," Brewster told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on Sunday. "The feeling is not underplayed between the states. All our trophy games are big games, important games. This one is more important than the rest of them."

During his Monday news conference, Bielema stopped short of calling the Gophers the Badgers' biggest rivals.
"I wouldn't label it as biggest, just because it's probably hard to weigh that scale," he said.

Bielema later cut to the heart of the issues between him and Brewster when he said, "You lose friendships or cause more hard feelings during recruiting than any game day."

Bielema has aggressively recruited Minnesota in his three years as UW coach, signing seven players, many of them highly ranked. One of Brewster's goals this year is to keep the top in-state players home and he appears to be on his way to doing that with oral commitments from six Minnesota players.

A story in the Star-Tribune Monday referred to a radio interview Bielema did last year in which he allegedly talked about being able to recruit any Minnesota player he wanted.

As for Bielema's mad dash across the field last season, some UW fans saw it as a response to pregame comments from the Gophers about wanting to run across the field and retrieve the Paul Bunyan Axe.

Bielema said he was just excited about winning "a very hard-fought game," which he realized would be the team's last trip to the Metrodome, since the Gophers open the new TCF Bank Stadium next season.

"Believe me, my sprint isn't near what it was in the past," Bielema said. "I was really excited to get a victory, to get over and shake Tim's hand and get with our team and celebrate."

The UW-Minnesota rivalry, the most-played in Division I football with 117 meetings going into Saturday, has almost always been spirited. The Badgers have won 11 of the last 13 and four straight in the series.

The indoctrination for many of the UW seniors came in the Metrodome in 2005, when Jonathan Casillas blocked a punt in the final minute and Ben Strickland recovered it in the end zone for the winning touchdown in a 38-34 victory.