The major media outlets in the nation all took notice when the Badger men's basketball team dropped Saturday's game to the lowly Bison of North Dakota State.
'I know all the obsessive people who are kind of like, 'Wow, those kind of things don't happen',' head coach Bo Ryan said at his press conference Monday. 'Oh yeah, they do. It's just amazing that things like that do not happen more to some teams. So maybe that hasn't happened very much around here in the past five years, and it does. Our guys are human. They can miss shots.'
That response set the tone for the next 20 minutes. The weekly press conference, which features two or three Badger head coaches, often resembles a scripted play, where the questions and answers have been rehearsed during the week, and the final performance in front of the cameras takes place each Monday at 12:30 p.m.
Barry Alvarez perfected the art during his tenure in three simple answers:
1) We're going to look at film and see where we need to improve.
2) (Insert Big Ten team name here) are a very solid, well coached team, and we're are going to have to be ready for them come Saturday.
3) I can't comment on that player's situation at this time. We are going to see have to see how things play out in the court system before I can comment.
This week, however, would be a little different. In fact, Ryan offered the media some comic relief after one of the more disappointing weekends in recent memory of Badger athletics.
After watching film, Ryan categorized the 72 shots UW took against the Bison.
'I'd say five of them I wouldn't let Mike Eaves take,' said Ryan, poking fun of the Badger hockey coach set to take the stage after Ryan's performance.
As the show carried on, Ryan talked about the positives that you can take away from a game where the Badgers shot a miserable 22 percent from the field and a packed house at the Kohl Center was left shaking their heads in disbelief.
'Well, there were people that got tickets for this game that didn't normally have tickets, so those people that complain and write letters that they can't get into the Kohl Center and blame it on me or somebody, they got to see the game,' Ryan jokingly said. 'I had more people that I've heard from that say, 'Oh, this is the first game I was ever able to make, because my neighbor gave me the tickets because they were doing this. How about that for a positive, pulling that out of the air'?
If you follow Ryan long enough, he will let you in on some special moments in his life, Monday being one those days.
He described a Little League championship game where his dad took over as coach for one game, something he vowed never to do. The Ryans were down 11-4 heading into the bottom of the sixth inning and the elder Ryan sat his kids down for a speech before they took their final at bat.
'He sits everybody down in the dugout and goes into one of his tirades, but it was a good tirade. I had heard them all before, but this one was pretty good,' Ryan said. 'He's got guys crying in the dugout. Probably there would have been some parents today that would have had him arrested for how he was getting on us. He didn't touch any of us, but he got on us.'
Down two with the bases loaded, Bo hit a home run to win the game, but his father's reponse wansn't exactly what he expected.
'[After the game] he rips all these kids,' Ryan said. 'We set the stage, and he bought ice cream afterwards. It was the best. It doesn't get any better than that.'
Ryan's attitude and story telling Monday was refreshing to say the least. Losses during a stretch of 30-plus games are common, even to teams you should dominate on paper. In the grand scheme of things, the loss to North Dakota State means little to the Badger team. It's not college football and a loss like this won't hurt them come tourney time, especially since it was a non-conference affair.
If anything, it was an eye opener for both Badger players and fans that this team is not invincible when playing at the Kohl Center.
To paraphrase a line from a classic movie of our generation, Street Fighter, the win for the Bison against the mighty Badgers will be something North Dakota players will remember for the rest of their lives. For Ryan and the rest of us in Madison, it was just a Saturday.
