Your feel-good Badgers

One of the nice things about making the Sweet 16 is the extra week of media attention, both local and national. The Badgers have been getting a lot of pub this week, and several people have emailed interesting stories from around the Web.

-This is my favorite, referenced by Brian Lucas's daily newsletter (the season is just about done, but I would highly recommend subscribing to this, Brian does a great job aggregating Badger-related stories from around the web, not just from Wisconsin media outlets). It's an anecdote about Bo Ryan's last Platteville team, and shows that while fans of other teams like to lampoon him, he's the real deal, a cool guy who's in it for the love of the game. Glad he's on our side.

-You know what else I love about Bo? He lets his assistants do a lot of interviews, both on-air and in print. Howard Moore, Greg Gard, and Gary Close carry a high profile in this program, which isn't always the case.

-Justin Perras sent me a Washington Post story about Michael Flowers and Max Bass with some more details than we've seen in other profiles on the subject. Like Justin said, a nice profile from a media outlet with no connection to the team. Try reading any story about Max and Michael without getting a little bit misty-eyed.

-Here's one more to consider, a Sporting News column anointing UW the top football-basketball combo school. From a UW alum, no less. And Florida and Ohio State don't make his top eight, but Kansas and Oregon do. Hmmm ...

-And check out the comments from yesterday's post, some very good insight into the Badgers' chances going forward and what it means in the context of recent history.

Wisconsin-Kansas State thoughts ... Sweet

Terrific win for the Badgers, as close to a perfect second half as we could play. As the minutes wound down, I started thinking big picture about what this win over an upstart like Kansas State, with the kind of players it has, means.

It's validation in Bo's way of doing things: defense, control, steadiness. It's validation in the strength of building your program on veteran players who stick around for four or five years rather than one-and-doners who arrive on campus with one foot in the NBA draft. It's validation of an offensive philosophy that stresses balance rather than dominance. Last year, losing the Big Ten to Ohio State in spite of our tremendous team shook my confidence in this method. Now I'm back feeling good about it again.

It adds up to 31 wins and counting, and a chance to play into the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament for the fourth time this decade. Just try to wipe this smile off my face.

Game and second half thoughts:

-Good time for Pop and Stiemsma to have career games. Pop for the most part played under control, his charge notwithstanding, and showed K-State's youngsters how to make a shot. Stiemsma was around the ball and active all the time. Man, I wish he would have redshirted as a freshman, I'd be feeling a lot better about our chances next year.

-Landry gets two points - with zero field goal attemps! - and we win by 17? Wow. His third foul was careless.

-I was dead wrong that Krabby on Beasley and Flowers on Walker would get us beat. Beasley didn't do much in the second half, primarily against Krabby while the game was still in the balance. The announcers speculated it might have been his ankle. It was probably some of that, and probably some of us adjusting the defense to take away his drives.

Flowers battled Walker hard, that was a tough assignment. Walker was pushing a lot before the refs stepped in, but he's an athletic freak whose game is more fitted to the NBA game than the college game right now.

-Speaking of Walker, I thought the refs did a nice job of gaining control of the game when it was teetering on getting out of hand. The double technical on Walker and Butch was the right call, and they called some other ensuing chippy acts, and things settled down. K-State was upset about some of the fouls being called, but you know what? They were using their hands on defense - a lot. We don't, much. That's why we see the foul disparities most of the time, not some far-reaching officiating conspiracy funded by Andy North's golf winnings and orchestrated by the devious Bo Ryan.

-I love legal bone crushing picks, like Landry's on Pullen. There were a couple vicious ones in the West Virginia-Duke game. Shame on the on-ball defender's teammates for not calling it out.

-Think I heard that we play Friday, which is nice - an extra day to rest Pop's and Bohannon's ankles. Five full days off is golden this time of year, especially with a physical battle with Georgetown looming.

-One thing I like about winning this game so early on Saturday is our win will be scrolling across he bottom of the screen for the final 14 games, reminding people that we're still playing.

-Think I read in Brian Lucas's newsletter that we are one of only three Big Ten programs to win at least 30 games in back to back seasons, along with Indiana and Michigan State. Nice.

-A final thought before coloring Easter eggs: this team can still play better. Imagine an effort in which the guards are hitting their shots and locking down their guys; Butch and Landry are scoring inside; we are locking down the defensive boards; Stiemsma and J-Bo are doing their thing off the bench; and we're making 75% of our free throws. I would argue that of all the things the Badgers are capable of doing very well, in most wins we see only about 75% of them. We're going to need 100% efforts to beat Georgetown and Kansas.

Links, links, links

It's a slow night in Badgerland, so I wanted to point out some of the links we've added to the right-hand column in the last month or so.

-The official uwbadgers.com basketball and football blogs. Some food stuff here from the UW sports information department. The basketball blog, from Brian Lucas, is obviously the more active of the two right now; he also does a daily email newsletter.

-The Wisconsin Basketball Recruiting board. Keep track of the Badgers' recruiting targets (Evan Anderson! Jamil Wilson! Tyler Griffey! Diamond Taylor!) and already-committed high school players. Lots of updates from Heavystarch, who originally turned me onto the site in a comment here.

-The Wisconsin Sports Network, a nice site on state preps sports. Not much on future Badgers (Flavien Davis?!?!), mainly because there's only so many of them.

-Camp Lambeau, a nice blog with an emphasis much like this one, only with more on the Packers and multiple contributors.

-The Chris West Basketball Journal - Chris is a basketball junkie and does a great job getting to a game whenever he can. Apparently he was also worried about the Penn State game.

-Hoopraker, a Big Ten basketball blog that's a good place for getting up to speed on conference opponents.

-Brewercentric, the best blog about the Milwaukee Brewers written by guys from West Bend on the World Wide Web! Stop by to see what these dudes think about Mike Cameron.

-Toohey's Randomania, where Tim Toohey writes about Maxim and brake pads. That dude needs to give me a permanent reciprocal link.

-Chris Earl Books. "You're in the Hot Box, hello! Buy my books!"

-Javier and the Bear, my cousin Dan Zima's band.

If you're looking to exchange reciprocal links, or if you just want to suggest a link to a good Badger-related site, please email me at scott_tappa@hotmail.com.