Wisconsin has won 38 of its last 39 home games. So forgive Northwestern coach Bill Carmody if on Monday, just two days before his team was scheduled to travel to Madison, Wis., he conceded that the Badgers were “almost impossible to beat up there.”
After all, it was only the truth.
Before No. 1 Illinois gutted out a 75-65 victory Jan. 25, snapping Wisconsin’s 38-game home winning streak, the Badgers had been 26-0 in home conference games since Bo Ryan took over as coach in 2001.
Wisconsin’s home dominance had raised the Kohl Center’s status from just another Midwestern arena to a well-reputed house of horrors, where opposing teams — like No. 12 Michigan State, which blew an eight-point lead Jan. 16 in the game’s final two minutes — come to whither and die.
The Kohl Center hype made the Wisconsin-Illinois contest the seventh-highest rated regular season college basketball game in ESPN history.
Today, with the national spotlight considerably dimmed, NU (8-9, 2-5 Big Ten) tries its hand at No. 19 Wisconsin (14-4, 5-2). In the teams’ only meeting last year, the Cats beat then-No. 14 Wisconsin 69-51 at Welsh-Ryan Arena.
“People say it’s a tough place to play, but I don’t think any of us are looking at it that way,” junior forward Vedran Vukusic said. “We’re going to go in there and fight like any other game.”
Vukusic said the players weren’t going to let the fans affect them, but Carmody, recalling three years of frustrating outcomes, acknowledged that Wisconsin was “a very difficult place to play.”
The first time Carmody took his team to Madison, it was a Sunday afternoon in 2001. Apparently football was still fresh in people’s minds.
“It was a one o’clock game, or something like that, and people had been imbibing,” Carmody recalled. “So it was a raucous crowd — they thought it was a Packers game.”
It was basketball, but one could hardly tell by the Wildcats’ point total that day: 37, a season-low. The Badgers won 59-37.
The following year, the Cats lost 77-43. A year later, the 69-50 score was more respectable but the result was the same: another Kohl Center defeat.
This year’s squad will try to reverse a losing trend that extends back nine years to 1996, the last time NU won at Wisconsin. In their last six defeats in Madison, the Cats have averaged 43.7 points and lost by an average of 19.5.
“It was just a crazy place — packed, everybody screaming and yelling,” senior Davor Duvancic said about his two trips to the Kohl Center. “It’s just a great place to play, a great place to be, so I’m definitely looking forward to the challenge.”
The challenge — becoming just the second Big Ten team to win at Wisconsin since 2001 — won’t be easy.
“They go about their business, sort of in a surgical way,” Carmody said, referring to the Badgers’ solid, unrelenting half-court defense and their ability to make the most out of their offensive possessions. “So yeah, we’re going to have to play well to stay with them.”
If the Cats show the kind of lapses that have plagued them since the beginning of the season — especially on the road — Carmody acknowledged they could get blown away.
“It’s possible,” he said bluntly. “(Wisconsin) can do that to people.”
Reach Anthony Tao at [email protected].
