Wisconsin basketball fans have been blessed with phenomenal levels of consistency throughout the past two decades. The team hasn’t missed the tournament since 1998, and it hasn’t finished lower than fourth in the Big Ten since 2001 before Bo Ryan took over.
However, despite a consistent level of success, the 2014-’15 team achieved more than any Badger team had before. They spent the entire season ranked in the top 10, got the school’s first-ever one-seed in the NCAA Tournament and made it to the championship game for the first time post-World War Two. Surely, this is the greatest accomplishment a Wisconsin team has ever had, right?
Wrong. The achievements of this year’s team are much more impressive than those of the last year’s squad.
The 2014-’15 team had an insane amount of talent. Two of the players were drafted in the first round of the NBA Draft, and another two are currently in the Developmental League. Another player on that team, Nigel Hayes, seems destined to play pro ball, and Bronson Koenig could hit the D-League as well, meaning the team was stacked. When a team is that good, the sky’s the limit.
This year’s team is another story. While Koenig and Hayes are certainly talented, before the season started, nobody had high hopes for remaining starters Ethan Happ, Vitto Brown and Zak Showalter, with the latter two seeming to be the weakest links. It felt like a rebuilding year with a talented freshman class coming in, and many fans seemed resigned to that fate.
The season started worse than anybody really expected with losses to Western Illinois, Marquette and UW-Milwaukee that seemed to doom the Badgers to the NIT. Then, when Bo Ryan retired a few games later, the situation seemed even more dire as coaching turmoil got tossed into a pot that was already filled with underperformance and a seeming lack of leadership.
Ryan’s replacement was Greg Gard, and Gard’s first few games did not give the Badger faithful much hope, as they went a meager 2-4 including a loss to a terrible Northwestern squad. The Badgers were sitting near the bottom of the conference with a 9-9 record, and a 1-4 record in Big Ten play. At that point, even the NIT seemed like a pipe dream.
However, a win against No. 4 Michigan State Jan. 17 sparked a seven-game winning streak that included impressive wins over Indiana and Maryland. By that point, Wisconsin was on the NCAA bubble, but with another top-10 win, this time against Iowa, UW cemented itself as a single-digit seed. After the win over the Hawkeyes, and the realization that the Badgers would make the tournament, my belief that this year’s accomplishments were better than last year was sealed, even if they lost in the first round. The team’s tournament performance only strengthens my point.
The win against Pitt was sloppy, but the victory against Xavier was impressive. Xavier was a team that most experts predicted to beat the Badgers, and a team that many had going to the Elite Eight. However, a historic 3-point shooting night from Bronson Koenig downed the Musketeers and the Badgers made the Sweet 16.
Sure, they blew what seemed to be a sure win against Notre Dame, but the fact that they even made the tournament was crazy, and winning two games is downright absurd. Not very many teams that start the season as a rebuilding team end up in the tournament at all. When you imagine a rebuilding team that underperforms early and has a mid-season coaching switch, a .500 record seems like it would be a successful year. And yet, the Badgers ended the year nine games above .500 and made it further than 335 other squads.
While almost winning a National Championship is certainly one of the best achievements a program can hope for, I think the 9-9 team with a new coach that rallied back and made it to the Sweet 16 deserves more praise.
