A lot can happen in 28 days. Even with practice and conditioning, 28 days without playing a hockey game will inevitably build rust.
Last March, when Purdue forward Caleb Swanigan scored 27 points in a 91-80 victory over Ethan Happ and the Wisconsin Badgers, Swanigan wasn’t even the Boilermakers’ best frontcourt player. A.J.
After No. 13 Wisconsin’s (2-0 Big Ten, 13-2 overall) 53-point victory over Florida A&M in late December, head coach Greg Gard candidly admitted that his team’s “mountain gets a lot steeper” as they enter conference play. With two conference wins, including an impressive 75-68 victory over No. 25 Indiana (0-2, 10-5), the Badgers have successfully reached their first conference plateau. Like any good climbers, the Badgers entered Bloomington, Ind., Tuesday evening prepared for the rough terrain they were set to face.
The No. 8 Wisconsin Badgers beat the No. 15 Western Michigan Broncos in the Cotton Bowl by playing their style of football: a slow, efficient offense complimenting a punishing and consistent defense. Paul Chryst’s team is not one that will have a lot of opportunities to blow opponents out, but they grind and wear down all challengers for four quarters, pulling ahead and staying ahead as they did in their 24-16 victory Saturday in Dallas. It started, as it has all season, with senior running back Corey Clement and the rushing attack.
In Wisconsin’s first game of the season at Lambeau Field, Troy Fumagalli was the key offensive player, totaling 100 yards on seven catches.
Don’t let Marie Polzer’s southern drawl fool you. She is a Badger through and through. Polzer grew up in Arlington, Texas and resides there now.
After floundering to a 47-100 record over the past five seasons under head coach Bobbie Kelsey, Wisconsin women’s basketball fired Kelsey, looking for a coach to rebuild and retool the program. The team found that person in new head coach Jonathan Tsipis, a former Atlantic 10 Coach of the Year, and a key component of Notre Dame’s recruitment corps that built a powerhouse program. This season, the team has welcomed in eight new players––six of which are freshman.
Futility and Rutgers basketball have been like Siamese twins, tied together by the hip for the past 15 years.
The Big Ten season is finally at the doorstep, and everyone is chomping at the bit to get things underway.
Final exams might have taken up much of the No. 14 Wisconsin Badgers’ (11-2) time over the past week, but Friday night, in UW’s final tune-up before Big Ten conference play, the Badgers passed any possible test, breezing by Florida A&M (2-11), 90-37. After UW’s victory over Green Bay last Wednesday, the Badgers had the weekend off to prepare for finals.
Before dipping into Big Ten play for what should be an eventful conference season, the No. 14 Wisconsin Badgers (10-2) host Florida A&M (2-10) Friday night in a matchup that could get ugly. The Rattlers have just two wins on the season and haven’t won a single game against a Division I opponent thus far.
The Badgers came into Green Bay with wins against Butler (3-7), Tennessee State (3-5), Illinois State (3-6) and Mississippi Valley State (3-5), while UWGB had gone 8-1 up to that night, with the one loss coming at the hands of the No. 2 team in the country, Notre Dame.
Ethan Happ spent the entirety of his summer working to improve his jump shot. But it wasn’t until a zero-degree day, with snow lining the Madison sidewalks, that the sophomore forward showed off his work. “It gave me a little bit of a chill feeling,” Happ said of the first basket he’s made outside of the paint while at UW. Happ’s jumper, with just over nine minutes to play in the first half, came in the midst of No. 14 Wisconsin’s (10-2) best offensive stretch of the night.
Back in November, Ohio State came into Madison and surprised many by playing toe-to-toe with Wisconsin.
By several different measures, this was arguably the greatest semester in Wisconsin athletic history. The football team went from unranked all the way up to No. 8 in the country, providing plenty of heart-stopping moments along the way and coming up just shy of a Big Ten title and a College Football Playoff berth. The volleyball team earned its first ever No. 1 ranking before falling in heart-breaking fashion in the Elite Eight.
This weekend, for the first time in its history, Wisconsin won its Big Ten opener. The league has only been around for four years, but the win is still an impressive milestone for a program that has floundered in the conference the past two years.
In what was arguably Wisconsin’s (4-8) most well-played game of the season, the Badgers could not pull off the upset Sunday and knock off in-state rival Marquette.
As the Badgers trotted off the court and into the locker room at the end of the second set of the regional final match Saturday night, the fans who filled the seats in the Field House roared with excitement, feeling the dream of a Final Four berth slowing becoming a reality. Three sets later, the raucous atmosphere inside the Field House had been replaced with sobering silence, as the thousands of fans who once seemed so confident in their team struggled to come to grips with what they just witnessed.
After less than two minutes of action in No. 17 Wisconsin’s (9-2) victory over Marquette (7-3) Saturday afternoon, sophomore forward Ethan Happ picked up his second foul in as many minutes.
Two teams extremely familiar with each other fought until the very end in a Sweet 16 match for the ages that had one team screaming for joy after a comeback. The No. 3 Wisconsin Badgers (17-3 Big Ten, 28-4 overall) took on Ohio State (10-10, 22-12) for the third time this season, in a match that was very different from the first two meetings.
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