UW-Idaho State thoughts

I'm in Cincinnati for company budget meetings and upon checking into my room at the Hannaford Suites tonight I was pleasantly surprised to find the Big Ten Network among the cable offerings. The Badgers were up 10-2 at the time, and I figured this would be a nice blowout to wipe away the Marquette loss.

Then the Badgers proceeded to let the visitors from Potato Land hang around for 32 minutes or so before doing enough to win close and ugly. I was never that worried, at least not until Pop for some reason charged into the lane early following his free throw miss with 2.1 seconds left, allowing Idaho State to set up a last-second attempt, but ...

It reminded me a lot of the North Dakota State game we somehow lost three seasons ago. The effort was there -- we had a ton of offensive boards -- but the shooting was putrid and the defense allowed a lot of really good looks. ISU shot 53 freaking percent! Maybe it will turn out Idaho State is pretty good, but this one still smells.

We also didn't ever truly put them away, even when our lead got near double-digits. Wisconsin is really struggling against zones right now, and I would expect we'll see a lot more as the season progresses. Why didn't Nankivil play more?

I'm not finding a lot of positives from this one, anyone got one?