After announcing Monday that the 2015-16 season will be his last, Bo Ryan’s retirement from the coaching ranks is good reminder for not only the University of Wisconsin but for college basketball as a whole that Ryan ranks right up with guys like Tom Izzo at Michigan State, Mike Krzyzewski at Duke, Roy Williams at North Carolina, Rick Pitino at Louisville, and Jim Boeheim at Syracuse as legends in the college game.
These guys, with the exception of Pitino, are college basketball lifers. They turned down opportunities from the NBA, and instead created legendary legacies at their respective schools.
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Ryan started his college coaching career at Wisconsin-Platteville, a Division III school, where he coached for 15 seasons. While there he transformed the program into a powerhouse, taking claim to two undefeated seasons and winning four national championships. He moved onto the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin for two seasons from 1999-2001 before landing the Wisconsin job.
He may not have had the longevity in the Division I college game like Boeheim or Williams, but what Ryan has accomplished in what will be 15 seasons at Wisconsin can’t be stated enough. Prior to Ryan, Wisconsin only reached the NCAA tournament seven times, making the Sweet Sixteen only one time since 1947.
They hadn’t won a regular season Big Ten championship since 1947 and had never won a conference tournament championship either.
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With Ryan at the helm, they reached the tourney in all of Ryan’s 14 seasons, reaching the Sweet Sixteen seven times. They won the conference championship four different times and won the conference tournament three times. Simply, his accolades are unmatched at Wisconsin.
He turned an average basketball program into a perennial tournament team, a Big Ten championship contender, and one of the finest in the nation.
Ryan’s lasting impact could be his previous two seasons at Wisconsin, where he took the program on a run to back-to-back trips to the Final Four. One including an upset of a previously undefeated 38-0 Kentucky squad littered with future NBA draft picks.
While Ryan was highly respected by both coaches and fans prior to the Final Four run, it’s clear that his legacy was taken to a whole new level after the dominant two years.
Stepping away at this time certainly isn’t that shocking for Ryan. He’ll be 68 in December and it’s understandable if he wants to enjoy his retirement a little bit earlier than most coaches do. But even with his program on a predictable downswing after losing Frank Kaminsky and company, his program has never been more relevant.
I would have expected another couple years out of Bo, maybe one last push for a national championship with a new core of under-the-radar talent. But, obviously, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Ryan’s a true underdog story, working his way up from being a history teacher and coach at Brookhaven Junior High School to coaching in the national championship. Really, he was a perfect fit at Wisconsin, a school that for much of the last 50 years wasn’t good at basketball and wasn’t supposed to be good at it, either.
But in true Bo Ryan fashion with the odds against him, he proved to have found a winner. Now with his last season at the helm in Madison, he’ll look to do the same thing as he’s always done — prove everybody wrong and just win.
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