The Northwestern Wildcats are likely to make the Wisconsin Badgers look good on Wednesday night when the two teams meet on Senior Night in the Kohl Center. Northwestern and Nebraska have resided in the basement of the Big Ten all season long. They played an ugly game this past Sunday, and Northwestern won it only because Nebraska was an improbably awful 8 of 30 from the free throw line.
Yes: 8 of 30. On free throws. That’s how Northwestern won its only Big Ten road game of the season. The Wildcats have been a bad team this season. They haven’t had a good team in any of the past three seasons.
Wait a minute: Isn’t this the same program which made the 2017 NCAA Tournament and won an NCAA Tournament game? Didn’t Northwestern, under Chris Collins, make history by reaching its first NCAA Tournament and winning its first game in the Big Dance? Wasn’t all of this supposed to ignite the program and lead to vastly improved recruiting of the Chicago pipeline? Wasn’t this supposed to make Northwestern — which renovated Welsh-Ryan Arena — a hot new place for recruits to play college basketball? Wasn’t Northwestern’s breakthrough supposed to lead to a new era of prosperity?
Not only has this NOT happened; it hasn’t even come close to happening. Chris Collins owns a piece of college basketball immortality as the man who finally led Northwestern to the promised land after 78 seasons without an NCAA Tournament, but he has been a bad coach with no answers in the three years since that seminal achievement. The face-plant of Northwestern basketball makes that 2017 joyride — as great as it was — seem like a notable aberration, not the product of anything sustainable or enduring.
Wisconsin basketball doesn’t know what this feels like.
The Badgers were once in Northwestern’s shoes, with 47 straight years without an NCAA Tournament appearance. Sure, 47 isn’t 78, but that is still a very, very long time. Wisconsin walked in the wilderness, and when the Badgers finally began to make the NCAA Tournament again in the 1990s, did anyone seriously think UW would make the Big Dance on an annual basis, churning out solid if not spectacular teams with great consistency?
Northwestern had one moment in one season at one point in time.
Wisconsin has had multiple decades of reliable production and performance, with only one missed NCAA Tournament in the past 21 years.
Northwestern will probably make Wisconsin look good on Wednesday night. Northwestern already makes UW look good on a much larger historical scale.