Drubbings aren’t fun, and the Wisconsin Badgers just absorbed one on Friday night at the hands of the Michigan State Spartans. The fact that Wisconsin uncorked two 13-0 runs in the game and still lost by a large margin is hard to process, both intellectually and emotionally. Should Wisconsin fans be quietly encouraged that Wisconsin fought back on multiple occasions in this game, or discouraged that those runs were followed by bad stretches and didn’t lead to sustained high-quality basketball? I don’t know. That is for you to decide.
However, in a larger context, it should not be very controversial to say that of all the losses Wisconsin has absorbed this season, this is the least problematic. Michigan State isn’t an elite team — at least, not yet — but it does have the best claim to being the top team in the Big Ten. Michigan State is the best team Wisconsin has faced to this point in the season. The game was in East Lansing at the Breslin Center. Michigan State was coming off a 29-point loss, easily its worst game of the whole season.
When the people in Las Vegas explain betting lines and over-under totals, they mention background details such as the ones I outlined above. Some games have no clear setup, no obvious context in which one team is likely to be a lot better than another. This was not one of those games. We wrote a story earlier in the week with the title, “Michigan State will be angry, so Wisconsin must be ready.”
Another story we wrote earlier in the week was a big-picture overview of Wisconsin’s regular-season series against Michigan State. We noted that Wisconsin plays Michigan State twice before Super Bowl Sunday, February 2. As long as Wisconsin wins the rematch in the Kohl Center on February 1, the Badgers can be satisfied with their regular-season series against Michigan State.
This wasn’t a home loss to Illinois. This wasn’t a road loss to North Carolina State or Rutgers. This wasn’t a loss to New Mexico. This is a loss Wisconsin can grow from. It’s not the kind of loss which will uniquely hurt the Badgers in the Big Ten. Not one team is likely to win in East Lansing.
This isn’t an attempt to pump sunshine into the internet after a subpar showing. This is an attempt to make sure no one overreacts to this particular loss. Richmond and New Mexico in Brooklyn were worth the alarm bells. This game? It’s the least alarm-worthy loss of the season to date.
As Aaron Rodgers would say, “R-E-L-A-X.”