INDIANAPOLIS – The Wisconsin Badgers admitted there was a seed of doubt. We’re thinking it was a Guinness Book of Records-size seed.
How could the Badgers go into last night’s national semifinal game against Michigan State truly believing they had a chance to continue their improbable run in the NCAA Tournament?
Three times previously the Badgers and Spartans had met this season. Three times the Spartans had prevailed.
“You know I think the one advantage we have is we have won the games,” said Michigan State coach Tom Izzo. “But our players really respect their team. You know, we won one game, I guess fairly easy but they didn’t shoot very well and the other two were kind of dog fights that could have gone either way down the stretch. So we know what we’re in for and I’ll guarantee you, it will be a tough game.”
So Izzo’s task in the week leading up to last night was this: prevent his players from becoming overconfident. The Spartans (30-7) had beaten the Badgers (22-13) every which way you can beat a team.
They won the first meeting, 61-44 at Wisconsin. The Spartans hammered the Badgers on the boards, 50-23.
The second game was at East Lansing, and Michigan State came away with a hard-fought 59-54 triumph. The Badgers committed 17 turnovers in that game, about six more than they average.
And in the Big Ten Conference Tournament, the Spartans forced the Badgers into a woeful shooting performance and claimed a 55-46 triumph.
How could the Spartans not take a healthy amount of confidence into last night’s game?
“I think it has to,” said Michigan State forward A.J. Granger. “You can’t overlook that. We know this is a new game and we know we can’t rely on those wins to get us a win here. It’s a whole different ballgame. They’ve been playing better basketball. I think they’re really starting to gel as a team and play the type of basketball they wanted to play all year. It looked like they were out of synch earlier in the year. I think it’s come around for them. We’ll have to play our best basketball game to try to get a win.”
Actually, it was the Badgers who had to play their best game. They had to come up with a Villanova-like performance against Georgetown in the 1985 national championship game. They had to hold their own on the boards and shoot lights out, a tough assignment for a team that usually seems as if it’s shooting in the dark.
But most of all, the Badgers had to take that seed of doubt and plant it. Not in their minds, but deep in their lockers. Since mid-February, they had lost just three games – all to the Spartans.
“If you’re asking, is there a seed of doubt, I would be lying if I spoke for [my team] and said there wasn’t, or if I spoke for myself,” said Wisconsin coach Dick Bennett. “When a team beats you three times, then you perhaps say that’s a superior team.”
Michigan State is the superior team. And the Spartans had beaten the Badgers at their own game, a deliberate, defensive-minded contest.
The Spartans, in players such as the 6-foot-9, 230-pound Granger, and 6-8, 240-pound Andre Hutson, and 6-8, 250-pound Aloysius Anagonye, have the big bodies to bang with Wisconsin. They have scorers such as Morris Peterson and Charlie Bell. They have the epitome of a point guard in Mateen Cleaves.
And they had three wins over Wisconsin, a fact Izzo has desperately tried to nullify. He was poised for the first question he faced on Friday, ‘Do the wins give you an advantage?”
“None,” Izzo said flatly. “You know, in all honesty, I think does it make it more difficult, is there and advantage? I guess that’s been the question all week. And every TV or newspaper article I’ve seen or heard or people told me about, it seems like half the people are jumping on, ‘Well, you beat them three times, you should beat them a fourth.’ The others are saying, ‘I’ve never heard of a team beating a team four times.'”
The Badgers had been carried by the suddenly hot shooting of Jon Bryant, who had hit 50 percent of his 3’s in the tournament. They had gotten solid play from Mark Vershaw. They had a steady, heady point guard in Mike Kelley.
But they didn’t have the offense to match Michigan State, and one got the sense the Badgers knew it.
“I heard coach talking and you know, there is some seeds of doubt when you lose to a team three times in a row,” said Andy Kowske. “It just shows us that we’re going to have to play extremely well to win this game. And we know what Michigan State’s all about, and obviously being such a good team and [us] losing three times, to win the next game most people think is improbable. But I think we just go out and play defense. That’s our confidence right there, our defense.”
