Bo Ryan’s Retirement Shakes Up College Basketball

Bo Ryan announced his retirement after Wisconsin’s win on Tuesday, quickly shaking up the college basketball landscape.

College basketball loses one of the good guys today.

Few coaches can tout the accomplishments that Bo Ryan can.

Fourteen straight NCAA Tournament appearances, coming off of back-to-back Final Fours, seven Sweet 16s and never finishing lower than fourth in a consistently difficult Big Ten conference, Ryan took a program that had just five trips to the Big Dance before and turned it into a juggernaut.

Wisconsin has been a staple in college basketball for most of my life and for most of his current player’s lives. The Badgers weren’t exactly a prominent program before he came on board, but he brought them into a new spotlight, the upper echelon of college basketball.

His departure is bittersweet in that he’s calling it a career on his terms. Rather than finish out the year, Ryan decided to end it after the final game of Wisconsin’s semester, a win over Texas A&M-Corpus Christi on Tuesday.

Greg Gard has been named interim coach for the remainder of the year.

It’s very difficult to find a coach that’s as well-liked, professional and successful as Ryan has been over his career. His accolades will be acknowledged through the coming weeks and months as the Badgers look to regroup, but it’s the personality and the way he coached that made him so great.

Wisconsin has never been known for having outstanding NBA prospects, and that’s just fine. Some of the most successful college programs don’t have top-tier pro prospects, but there are very few players that come out of the Badgers’ system that have character questions or work ethic questions and yes, they’ve played the game the right way.

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Ryan’s coaching style didn’t reflect a pro game, but he taught the fundamentals: keeping your hands up, staying in front of your man, taking the good shot rather than the flashy shot.

He never had the best players, but he had the best teams. You probably couldn’t name more than a few Badgers that went on to have great pro careers. He never really had a fantastic recruiting class and a lot of his players were from the midwest. Ryan’s best asset was finding players that were moldable and could play, despite what some others may have thought of them coming out of high school.

When you look at college basketball, or college athletics in general, there are so many dark, murky undertones to everything that sometimes it’s hard to see the good in it.

Between the sanctions and scandals, the NCAA’s ‘investigative’ practices and the amateurism issue, everywhere you look there’s something that makes you wonder: What exactly is the appeal of college sports?

Bo Ryan exemplified the good in college athletics. He took players nobody else wanted and made them into great players, great teammates and great people. I’m sure they’re out there, but you’d be hardpressed to find somebody with anything more than a small gripe against Ryan. Every coach ticks people off here or there, but it’s hard to find a coach as universally respected as Ryan.

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We knew this was coming. Ryan had waffled on retiring after this season once already, so the timing is a bit odd, but he’s going out on his terms and he’s earned that right.

Sitting with a 7-5 record now, the Badgers will look to regroup without Ryan, and it won’t be easy. You don’t easily replace a coach like Bo Ryan.