I always find this logic a bit winding and hard to pin down.
I watched a lot of Bo Ryan teams. And through the years, they had plenty of losses that pissed me off a great deal. Is this kind of loss special to Greg Gard, but unheard of with Bo or Dick Bennett? I’m not sure, but I’m skeptical, in part because “this kind of loss” is not really well defined.
That's a fair criticism. I'll put it this way: I have never felt comfortable that Wisconsin will necessarily win a game under the Gard regime, until very late in that particular game, no matter the quality of opponent. Never. Losing a 15-point, second half lead, at home, against a good, but not great Oregon team is entirely consistent with what I expect. That
feels like a different kind of a loss than coming out flat on the road against a middling team (Bo Ryan losses).
Of course all coaches lose games it feels like they should win. And maybe its just recency bias, or maybe I just don't watch enough basketball to have a solid base to work from, but it has always felt like Gard's teams are just a little more unpredictable than Bo Ryan or Dick Bennett teams. Bennett just coached ugly, defensive basketball--nearly all of those games were close, boring, and could go either way.
There's an optimistic way to think about it, too. Wisconsin feels like it rarely has the really talented wunderkinds that shinier athletic programs tend to attract, and yet Gard has them much further up the conference table than the "experts" tend to predict. Maybe the reason they sometimes lose games like this is they aren't, player for player, that much better than anyone else, they are just better coached. But the coach doesn't actually control the floor, he just makes suggestions.
I don't know--but my gut feeling (as unprovable and logically unsound as it may be) is that Gard's teams have at least one--and often more--of these head shakers a year--and they are consistently bigger head shakers than Bo Ryan had.
I was also on campus when the Badgers made their first NCAA tournament in forever, so I still don't take tournament appearances for granted. But I would like to see this team win a couple in the tournament this time around. And I still hold my breath every time I watch or check the scoreboard.
