The Badgers were college basketball royalty, only to have their brief tenure as the nation's top team end abruptly.
No. 1 Wisconsin fell to unranked Michigan State 64-55 in East Lansing, Mich. Tuesday night, the first time a Spartan club has knocked off a top-ranked team.
Down the stretch the Badgers went ice cold and MSU junior guard Drew Neitzel got red hot. The junior point guard scored 28 points on 10-of-17 shooting and went 6-of-11 from beyond the arc as UW hit only two late meaningless field goals in the final 7:08.
After junior forward Brian Butch knocked down a bank shot with 7:08 to play, giving Wisconsin a 49-45 lead, Neitzel took over. He knocked down back-to-back threes, a runner as the shot clock expired and another backbreaking long ball that rolled around the rim, bounced up and went in. During that time, less than a five-minute stretch, the Badgers could only muster two free throws from senior guard Kammron Taylor, his only points of the entire game.
The AP reported after the game that head coach Bo Ryan did not think the pressure of being No. 1 contributed to the poor performance.
""I don't think that had anything to do with it,"" Ryan said in the post-game press conference. ""Michigan State played better.""
Following the Neitzel three, the Badgers resorted to rushed 3-point attempts by junior guard Michael Flowers, Taylor and senior forward Alando Tucker, who scored only two of his 16 points in the second half.
It was only the second road loss for the Badgers all season, with the other one coming at Indiana.
As cold as he was in the second period, Tucker was red hot in the first half, scoring 14 and knocking down four 3-pointers. But what carried the Badgers until the end was a breakout offensive performance from sophomore forward Marcus Landry. Landry had a team-high 18 points on 6-of-10 shooting from the field and 4-of-6 shooting from behind the arc. Coming into the contest, Landry had only hit three 3-pointers in conference play.
However, Landry missed two free throws with a little over four minutes to play and the Badgers up one.
Aside from Tucker and Landry's 12-of-25 combined shooting, the Badgers shot just 7-of-29, less than 25 percent. Flowers, who shot a dreadful 2-of-10, and sophomore forward Joe Krabbenhoft tied for third on the team with five points. Taylor went scoreless until the aforementioned free throws, being held without a field goal for the first time since last year's Big Ten tournament loss to Indiana.
""That's the best defense I've faced this season,"" Tucker told the AP.
Wisconsin got down early. After a rare Bo Ryan technical foul, the Badgers trailed 7-0. But they would fire back, going on a 16-3 run capped off by a Greg Stiemsma jumper, the junior center's second within just over a minute.
And the game would go back and forth until that Neitzel tear. The contest had 15 lead changes and five ties.
For MSU, other than the sparkling play of Neitzel, Raymar Morgan and Travis Walton chipped in with 12 and 11, respectively, showing off the bright future the Spartans have.
The Badgers will look to regroup before their match up with No. 2 Ohio State in Columbus. A win over the Buckeyes, followed by a win over MSU at home next Wednesday, would assure the Badgers at least a share of the Big Ten regular season title and a No. 1 seed in the upcoming Big Ten tournament in Chicago.
