Rastall Ramblings: Gard should be nowhere near hot seat even after BYU loss

For a seventh consecutive NCAA Tournament, the second weekend is rolling around and the Wisconsin Badgers will be watching from home.

The latest first-weekend flameout for the Badgers came at the hands of the BYU Cougars — a game where No. 3 seed Wisconsin looked overmatched and utterly disjointed throughout the first half as the sixth-seeded Cougars carried an 11-point lead into halftime.

BYU continued to keep the Badgers at arm’s length for much of the second half, but a John Tonje takeover late allowed Wisconsin to nearly pull off a frantic comeback in the closing minutes. However, Tonje’s last shot to try and force overtime was no good and the Cougars escaped with a two-point win.

That loss has renewed restlessness among Badgers fans over the fact that the team hasn’t been to the Sweet 16 since 2017 — a frustrating drought for a program that never went longer than two years without making it to the Sweet 16 under Hall of Famer Bo Ryan.

For a particularly vocal slice of the fanbase, it has even led to some calls for head coach Greg Gard to be fired. Personally, I think that idea is extremely shortsighted.

I totally get the frustration with Wisconsin’s inability to advance past the first weekend over the last eight years. You can point to mitigating factors — Oregon was a tough 12 seed in 2019 because they were injured most of the year and got healthy just in time for March and Chucky Hepburn was injured against Iowa State in 2022 — but the record is what it is. The Badgers are 3-5 in their last five NCAA Tournament appearances. Four of those losses came against lower seeds, including three double-digit seeds.

That’s a shoddy recent tournament track record and it’s fair to bring it up when evaluating Gard as a coach. But it’s not nearly enough to justify firing him when you look at the bigger picture.

Since Gard took over when Bo resigned early in the 2015-16 season, Wisconsin is 117-77 in conference play. The only two Big Ten teams with better league records during that time span: Purdue (138-55) and Michigan State (127-66). Tom Izzo is a Naismith Hall of Famer and Matt Painter is a virtual lock to join Izzo in that club eventually, so there’s hardly any shame in being behind them.

In Gard’s 10 years at the helm, the Badgers have won a pair of Big Ten regular season titles (he was named the conference coach of the year both seasons) and they’ve made the NCAA Tournament seven times, which would’ve been eight if COVID-19 didn’t cause the cancelation of the 2020 tournament.

I’d like to think that Wisconsin’s floor as a program has raised in the last 25-30 years, but even then, there is nothing inherent about Badgers basketball that should make one believe that the level Gard has kept them at is something that just about any coach could pull off. Indiana has a much richer history and deeper pockets than Wisconsin yet has been worse than the Badgers for almost the entirety of the 2000s.

Gard has also shown a willingness to adapt. After Wisconsin missed the NCAA Tournament in 2023 following a season where they had the 140th-ranked offense in the country per KenPom, Gard overhauled the program’s identity by leaning much more heavily on a ball-screen continuity offense and picking up the pace. The result has been the Badgers having their two best offenses of the Gard era the last two years.

And though Wisconsin still does plenty of the traditional recruiting and developing to serve as the backbone of the program, Gard has proven adept at finding high impact players in the transfer portal. AJ Storr was a solid find for the 2023-24 season. This year, obviously Tonje was a breakout star — going from a fairly unheralded transfer to being a second-team All-American.

You have a coach who is winning 60 percent of his Big Ten games, making the NCAA Tournament nearly every year and has shown a willingness to change with the times. That’s not the type of coach you quickly move on from due to some frustrations with results in a 68-team, single-elimination tournament. Obviously NCAA Tournament performance is a factor in evaluating coaches, but it’s foolhardy to have it override everything else that Gard has going for him.

Also, we’ve seen plenty of coaches who “can’t win in March” suddenly do so.

There was a stretch where Gonzaga made just two Sweet 16s in 13 years and posted a 12-13 tourney record during that time. Mark Few’s Zags responded by getting to the second weekend nine straight years. After Virginia’s loss to UMBC in 2018, plenty of critics questioned whether Tony Bennett’s system could get to a Final Four. They won a national title the next year.

Matt Painter’s Purdue Boilermakers had a three-year stretch where they were ousted from the tournament by a 13 seed, a 15 seed and a 16 seed. They made a run to the national championship game the next year. Even Bo Ryan, the best coach in Wisconsin basketball history, had a merely alright 16-12 NCAA Tournament record at one point and was often discussed as a coach who would always get to March Madness but never make a deep run. His last two seasons saw the Badgers reach back-to-back Final Fours.

These are Hall of Fame level coaches and I’m not saying Gard is going to definitely hit the highs these guys did, but the point is that success in March can just sort of suddenly arrive. If Gard continues to put out competitive teams and refuses to get complacent in how he’s running the program, I suspect the same reversal in fortune could be coming his way.