Nigel Hayes knew something was different the minute the lights went out for pre-game introductions.
Advertisement
Wisconsin coach Bo Ryan has announced his retirement.
Following a 64-49 win over Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, the longtime Badgers head coach called it quits during his press conference.
When you look at college basketball, or college athletics in general, there are so many dark, murky undertones to everything that sometimes it’s hard to see the good in it.
And if I’m Alvarez, I expect to be sacked if I don’t make that ask. Ryan’s retirement came at a bit of a curious time considering it is the middle of the season but it seems he might have had great intentions for calling it quits now, according to ESPN. “I think this gives him the best chance of becoming the next coach”.
The plan was to have Guthridge be the interstitial coach so that the guy who would get the gig for the long haul wouldn’t have to be the one to replace Dean Smith. His 364 wins overall at Wisconsin are the most in school history, and his 747 career victories put him 27th on the NCAA’s all-time list. Ryan has won three Big Ten tournament titles and four regular-season championships, and he led the Badgers to each of the last two Final Fours. “What we came down to was semester”.
The 45-year-old Gard inherits a young roster but a roster he helped piece together. Alvarez was on hand to compliment Ryan’s legacy. When he went on a surprising tangent about the graduate transfer rule following the 2015 NCAA title game loss to Duke, saying his program doesn’t “do rent-a-player,” many explicitly ignored the context of his statement in order to portray him as a sore loser.
College coaches retiring in the middle of the season has become a trend in 2015, and it’s not limited to football. At the same time, Greg Gard was flying around the country trying to find the best doctors for his father, who was suffering from cancer. Now he calls it an opportunity. So in October Ryan removed the certainty of that timing, suggesting he’d never really said it was “only” going to be one more year and that we in the media had, again, gotten it wrong.
The methodical brand of basketball that Bo Ryan ran at Wisconsin rarely surprised opponents as it piled up wins and two trips to the Final Four over the last two seasons. In 2000, Williams’s Terps visited Wisconsin for a game at the Bradley Center in Milwaukee.
“The baton has been passed”, UW athletic director Barry Alvarez said. “He brought that style of basketball here and won here at this level”.
Alvarez said he will evaluate how Gard works with the team and then make a decision at the end of the year on what the school wants to do.
Advertisement
“My response has always been ‘Absolutely, there should be, ‘” said Gard. “That’s his job, and I’ve never flinched or blinked from that. I’ve never had an issue with that”.
