The airport was empty.

Chris Haering dropped his rental car keys at an unmanned counter, breezed through a security checkpoint staffed by a single TSA agent and searched in vain for an open food vendor. He was the only one at his gate as a solo airline employee announced his evening flight from Duluth, Minn., to Madison, Wis. About 10 minutes before takeoff, two other passengers sauntered onto the plane, his only companions. They knew better than he about the need to board early for a flight from the northern tip of the country in the dead of winter.

When he joined Wisconsin’s staff in 2015, Haering was a Pennsylvania man through and through. After 17 years coaching high school ball in Pittsburgh, he caught on with Paul Chryst’s staff at Pitt in 2012 and made the move to Madison when Chryst took over the Badgers after the 2014 season. In addition to his role as special teams coordinator, Haering became the lead in-state recruiter—which is how, on his first trip to this part of Wisconsin, he’d found himself driving north from Madison to Eau Claire, then north another two hours to Superior, tucked between the lake bearing its name and Duluth, across the Minnesota border. “This was in mid-January, so it was iced-in,” Haering recalls. “A coach up there said you bring blankets and sweatshirts to a youth baseball game in July, because you just never know what’s going to blow in off the lake. I’m going, Wow, this is a little bit different.”

It didn’t take long for Haering to recognize the importance of trips to the state’s farthest reaches. Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s biggest metro area, has a population of 1.5 million; Madison, the next-biggest city, sits at 252,551. The state’s other 3.7 million residents live in towns beyond the interstate and on farms along the country roads—hamlets which yield the talent that fuels one of the most consistently successful programs in the nation.

Since 2014, only three schools have won more games than Wisconsin: Alabama, Ohio State and Clemson. After defeating Indiana 45–17 last Saturday, the Badgers are 9–0, ranked No. 8 and have all but clinched the Big Ten’s West Division. Although they are led by freshman running back Jonathan Taylor, a Heisman candidate from Salem, N.J., and sophomore quarterback Alex Hornibrook (West Chester, Pa.), exactly half of their players grew up in-state.