NCAA tournament: Wisconsin’s Bo Ryan nears the pinnacle

By John Feinstein Columnist April 5 at 6:12 PM

INDIANAPOLIS — It was shortly after midnight on Easter Sunday, and Bo Ryan was thinking about his dad. He had just won the biggest game of a long, distinguished coaching career, and his mind was on the coach who taught him to love the game. “I just wish he could have been here,” he said softly. “I wish .?.?.” He teared up and left the rest unspoken. He didn’t need to say anything else. Butch Ryan died in the summer of 2013, nine months before his son took Wisconsin to last year’s Final Four — his first trip there as a Division I coach. Butch Ryan was a legend in Philadelphia. A pipe-fitter by trade, he spent almost all of his free time coaching under-privileged kids, from pee-wees to teenagers. He taught the game — and perhaps more important, the love of the game — to his son. Now, at 67, Butch Ryan’s kid is 40 minutes away from the pinnacle of college basketball.

Moments before he teared up talking about his dad, Ryan and his Wisconsin players had sat on a dais, joking and telling stories and making everyone in the room laugh after the Badgers had stunned Kentucky, 71-64, ending the Wildcats’ dream of becoming the first men’s college basketball team in 39 years to go undefeated. Wisconsin won because their players mirrored their coach when the game was on the line: tough, unrelenting and unafraid to make plays when they had to be made.

“It was just the end,” Ryan said — echoing what Kentucky Coach John Calipari had said moments earlier. “The last five minutes. These guys just gutted it out. I told them, I’ll hang out on the sideline for another 40 minutes [Monday] night.” While he’s hanging out, Ryan is likely to see a pretty good basketball game. Duke hasn’t been seriously challenged in this NCAA tournament. The Blue Devils have won five games by an average of 17.6 points and were dominant the last 36 minutes Saturday while cruising to an 81-61 win over Michigan State. In a sense, both coaches face unique challenges in the time between their semifinal victories and the ball going up Monday night.

Mike Krzyzewski knows — because he’s coaching in his ninth championship game — that his players were expecting to play Kentucky. In the back of their minds, all week, has been the notion that they were going to be the last team standing between the Wildcats and history. Instead, they find themselves playing a team they beat on the road earlier this season, but that was in November, four months and a college basketball lifetime ago. Krzyzewski’s challenge will be making his players understand just how good Wisconsin is right now, that the Badgers’ win Saturday was no fluke. The Badgers are a team on a mission after last year’s Final Four loss to Kentucky.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/wisconsins-bo-ryan-nears-the-pinnacle/2015/04/05/454d45d6-db3a-11e4-8103-fa84725dbf9d_story.html