After winning on the road for the 3rd time in Big Ten play yesterday Wisconsin sits just a half a game out of 1st place in the Big Ten standings. It also marked a 4th straight win for a Badgers team most left for dead after a 1-3 start to the conference season. It also got me to thinking, is this Badgers team really back? Or is it a case of the craziness that is the 2011-12 Big Ten season?
I’ll readily admit that I fully thought us Badgers fans were about to see a collapse like we did in the 2008-09 season and for good reason. Both teams started out red hot but collapsed early on in the Big Ten season and did so because they couldn’t shoot the ball to save their lives. In that fateful 2008-09 season we saw a team lose 6 straight conference games before picking it up to end the season with a narrowly earned NCAA tournament birth.
2011-12 started off with Wisconsin winning easily over teams that as the season carries out aren’t very good at all and a pretty good performance in a loss to North Carolina still had Badgers fans in the mindset that this was a very good basketball team, one worthy of the Top 15 ranking it earned to start the season.
Then came the crushing home blowout to Marquette that most shoved to the side thanks to the miraculous comeback win by the Badgers in the Big Ten Football Championship game that followed only a few short hours later. Wisconsin got back on the winning track by taking down the rest of the remaining state foes as well as some less than stellar teams and all seemed right with the world.
Wisconsin opened up Big Ten play on the road and took down Nebraska, which most assumed would happen, winning by 24 points on the road. It all seemed like it should for the Badgers, right? Then lowly Iowa came to town and down came the newest home court winning streak as the Badgers lost their shooting touch.
Things only got worse from there as they lost a 2nd straight home game, a 63-60 loss in OT to Michigan State. Losing twice at home is something we haven’t experienced much since Bo Ryan took the reigns of this program. But losing to Michigan State can be forgiven, there are worse teams to lose to at home, but then came a road loss to Michigan to cap off a 3 game losing streak.
That 59-41 loss was brutal on all accounts and it seemed like Wisconsin just didn’t have what it took to compete at the top of the conference this year. Especially since it was 3 straight games where they really couldn’t find the bottom of the net like they had been earlier this season.
Fast forward two weeks and the scene around the Badgers program is much different. They’ve managed to go into the house of horrors that’s Mackey Arena and take down Purdue and that seems to have been the catalyst to a resurgent Wisconsin team that now stands just that half game out of 1st place.
So, am I ready to say we are back? Or can you chalk this winning streak up to the deep Big Ten and it’s crazyness this year? Honestly, it’s a mixed bag really. I want to say the Badgers are back and I think an impressive 3-1 road record, the best in the Big Ten, along with Jordan Taylor’s performance over the past week point to that being exactly the case.
It also goes to show that what I thought happened to Taylor was pretty accurate. No one would talk about his ankle tweak earlier in the year, but clearly something was off in his game. He wasn’t driving to the basket and was more content to dribble in one area of the floor rather than moving side to side to help the swing offense. But over the past 5 games or so he’s become increasingly aggressive on both ends of the floor and the stats bare that out as well.
However, and I can’t believe I’m about to say this, I am not ready to say they are back until they take care of business at home for a change. They’ve lost more home than road games in conference play and winning tomorrow against an Indiana team that was as hot as anyone at one point will officially put me in the “We’re Back” camp.
I say it’s a mixed bag because it’s so hard to predict anything in the Big Ten this year. I mean Penn State owns a win over a Top 25 team and so does both Iowa and Nebraska. It’s clear that any team that can stay hot for an extended stretch of time has as good a shot of winning this thing as anyone and right now no team is hotter than Wisconsin at the moment in the conference.
Funny how a season can seem so lost and yet so close to where most thought it actually would be in just a matter of 4 or 5 games, but welcome to the Big Ten in 2011-12. Should Wisconsin put on a performance like they did on Sunday at home on over Indiana on Tuesday we just may have the Top 15 basketball team we thought we saw at the beginning of the season back for good, but as the first part of the Big Ten season has taught us, hold on to your hats as this could be one bumpy ride to the finish line in early March.
These are my views, what say you?
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