Maybe this is starting to show that Gard<Ryan?
When you have the culture Bo Ryan built, it takes a while for it to fall apart if the new guy can't sustain.
Oh. I don't know that was ever really a question. Bo won 73 percent of his games, finished top-4 in the league every year. There were some things his teams were absurd at every single year. Bo is very likely gonna make the Hall of Fame. Those streaks were gonna be hard to maintain, no matter what. If Gard is even 80 percent the coach Bo was, he should be in Madison for at least another decade.
And in truth, there were plenty of rough days in the Ryan era. Plenty of scoring droughts, plenty of bad shots. Some players who didn't develop, some trying seasons. I remember chats in college if the Badgers were destined to just always leave us wanting in March, a team that couldn't overachieve when it counted. Bo's first really high-lever team lost to a 7 seed. His second to an 11 seed it couldn't bully. I remember when I felt relief to compete in a loss to a higher seed in the tournament
UW is in the midst of a disappointing year, and even in that, the team has done some things very well. Next year will be a different beast, and the year after.
There's a possibility this is the start of the end, but I'll play wait and see. Something isn't going well, but we're a long way from it falling apart, at least for now. If the bad times are winning a Big Ten title (by overachieving), starting top-10 and still having a top-20 KenPom team, ehhh, we got a long way to fall. And the secret is, UW in its natural state ain't good. So you ride with someone who seems pretty good until the engine falls out.
(I always remember the downward trend of the football program. Two years of declining wins with a new coach. Much disappointment. The last team hated each other and almost lost to an FCS team. They won 40 games the next four years, two legit conference titles and a fluky third. This year's problems are this year's. And when you pile up enough this years that don't work out, you change. The prediction and long-terms guessing, I've watched too much to think on it. Shoot, I watched Matt Painter. I watched OSU win 25 games with a roster I was mostly told was going to get Matta fired had he been allowed to coach it)
