The Wisconsin Badgers celebrated a trip to the Final Four in the 2000 NCAA Tournament when they defeated the Purdue Boilermakers in the West Regional Final, but in order for Wisconsin to have the opportunity to reach the Final Four, they had to get to the Elite Eight first… and that required going through the No. 1 seed in the region.
Wisconsin played the Arizona Wildcats on the first weekend of the 2000 Big Dance. The Wildcats had won a national title three years earlier, in 1997. They were a No. 1 seed in 1998. Wisconsin, under Dick Bennett, was a little ol’ No. 8 seed given very little chance to reach the Final Four.
Yet, if you remember, the 2000 NCAA Tournament was a Dance made for underdogs. Wisconsin was able to join the parade of rebellious lower-seeded teams who triumphed in March of that year.
Fifth-seeded Florida knocked off top-seeded Duke and won the East Region. Eighth-seeded North Carolina knocked off top-seeded Stanford and won the South Region. Wisconsin didn’t want to be left out, but the Badgers had to take down Arizona to make a Final Four dream a distinct possibility. Wisconsin had to escape Salt Lake City in order to earn a plane ticket to Albuquerque for the West Regional and a Sweet 16 date with LSU.
The Badgers were up to the task, and they showed they were worthy at the defensive end of the floor.
The man in the photo attached to this story is Mike Kelley. He is shown in a press conference before the Wisconsin-Ohio State game on February 9 of this year. That was the game in which the 2000 Final Four team celebrated its 20th anniversary at the Kohl Center.
Kelley didn’t score the most points for the Badgers against Arizona — that honor went to Mark Vershaw, who scored 15 points — but he collected five steals on a day when Wisconsin nabbed 10 steals from a flustered, confused Arizona backcourt. Wisconsin forced 17 turnovers and held Arizona to 39-percent field goal shooting. The end result was not just a victory (as though that wasn’t a huge feat in its own right); Wisconsin became the first and only team to hold Arizona under 60 points in the 1999-2000 college basketball season.
This was a defensive clinic from Dick Bennett’s Badgers. It came at the right time during a run which transformed Wisconsin basketball history and reshaped the Badgers’ sense of what they could achieve as a program.