D'Amato: UW has low seeding, high ceiling

In what's left of a bracket they had a hand in busting, Wisconsin’s Badgers have the lowest seeding and the highest ceiling.

Is there anyone who thinks the eighth-seeded Badgers can’t beat No. 4 Florida in an East Regional semifinal Friday night at Madison Square Garden, or the winner of No. 3 Baylor vs. No. 7 South Carolina in the final Sunday?

True, any one of those teams could advance to the Final Four because none is dominant. They’ve lost a combined 34 games. But that’s precisely why you like Wisconsin’s chances to make it to Phoenix.

The Badgers are the most complete team of the bunch. They can beat you inside with Ethan Happ and Nigel Hayes or outside with Bronson Koenig, who has knocked down more shots than a roomful of pledges at a frat party. Role players Zak Showalter and Vitto Brown have a knack for doing the right thing at the right time.

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The Badgers can beat you with defense (61.8 points per game). They take care of the ball (26th in the nation in turnovers). They win close games (eight consecutive overtime victories).

And then there’s the trump card: experience. UW’s four seniors have won 115 games and are 13-3 in the NCAA Tournament. This is their fourth consecutive trip to the Sweet 16. They’ve won more tournament games over that span than Kentucky (12), North Carolina (10) and Duke (9).

They’ve experienced everything from playing in the championship game two years ago to suffering a heartbreaking loss to Notre Dame in the Sweet 16 last year to upsetting No. 1 Villanova in the second round this year.

There’s no substitute for that. You learn how to handle pressure situations by going through them. Hayes and Koenig committed turnovers in the closing seconds of the Notre Dame game and the lesson has stayed with them. You can bet if Hayes sees another two-man trap in the backcourt in the final minute of a tight game Friday night, he won’t try to dribble through it.

“I think this senior class has been through everything there is to go through in terms of basketball,” Brown said. “We’ve all had our highs and our lows. I think we’re a multifaceted group that has as much experience as you can possibly have. Having that allows us to share that knowledge with our younger (teammates).”

That experience, and the steady hand of coach Greg Gard, helped the Badgers navigate a late-season slump in which they lost five of six games.

“We knew to stay the course, stick with the process,” Gard said. “It wasn’t going to be irrational, outside-the-box changes. We just needed to get better at the things we do and become more consistent with it.

“We were going to work ourselves out of it. That experience helps you through that time. They don’t panic. There wasn’t a frantic approach or anything like that in the locker room. It was just that we needed to get better and play better.”

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The foundation of Wisconsin’s success is a philosophy, a culture, a “Badger way” of doing things. There are a lot of ways to build a basketball program. UW’s approach is to recruit kids who play a certain way, want to be coached and will stay four years. By the time they are juniors and seniors, they’ve forged an identity.

And that’s how blue collars are able to beat blue chippers.

“We do things that are the best way to help Wisconsin be successful and understand also what doesn’t work here and maybe won’t fit academically, socially, all those other pieces,” Gard said. “I think it’s a very unique formula. There’s a lot of ways to do it. You can go across the country and look at it school by school, but I think there’s a pretty unique formula that’s been figured out here.”

None of that, of course, guarantees victory in the Sweet 16. It still comes down to making shots, defending the rim, fighting through screens and all the other things one good team has to do to beat another.

That’s why you like the Badgers’ chances. They do all of those things better than most, and some of those things better than all.