No, Billy Donovan — the coach of the Oklahoma City Thunder who is on break with other NBA coaches during All-Star Weekend — was not actually speaking to Wisconsin fans on Saturday night. He was speaking very directly and personally to Florida basketball fans on the night when the Gators christened Billy Donovan Court in Gainesville. Florida won its first game in the house Billy Donovan made famous, beating Vanderbilt as it tries to improve its position relative to the NCAA bubble.
Yet, while Donovan was not actually addressing Wisconsin fans, the things he said give Wisconsin basketball fans good reason to pause and reflect on the longer journey the Badgers have made over the past 25 years. One week ago, the 2000 Final Four team was honored in Madison. Billy Donovan’s high honor at Florida marked the Gators’ own poignant and emotional basketball moment in this month of February. Florida-based writers who have followed the UF hoops program are engaged in a process of appreciating what Billy D meant to Gator basketball several years after his departure.
Listen to this short snippet of Donovan’s on-court remarks at halftime of the Florida-Vanderbilt game:
"Our legacies as coaches is not going to be by how many games or how many championships we win. Our legacy as a coach is always going to be measured by how our players talk about us." – Billy D đź’¬#GatorsHoop pic.twitter.com/SFydwJNHNI
— Florida Gators Men’s Basketball (@GatorsMBK) February 16, 2020
“I could not have imagined raising a family in a better community and a better environment, and for them, this is home. This is home for all of them.”
Cast aside for a moment the fact that Florida is struggling to make the NCAA Tournament, and that head coach Mike White is finding it hard to maintain the same lofty standard Donovan set in Gainesville.
Focus on the culture Donovan established. Focus on the gratitude of 28 Florida players who came to Gainesville to be there for the ceremony honoring their head coach. Focus on the clean nature of the Florida program under Mike White. Focus on the enrichment of a community due to sports, not just on the wins and losses. Yes, success is primarily measured by those wins and losses, but if the people who oversee and manage athletic departments and sports programs aren’t genuinely invested in improving lives and giving young athletes a needed sense of structure as they grow, why are we here?
Yes, Billy Donovan had to win a lot of games in order to receive the honor Florida gave him on Saturday night, but the key point to make is that in the process of winning, Billy Donovan enriched his community. It wasn’t an either-or proposition. It was a both-and situation. That is what any fan base — not just Florida’s or Wisconsin’s — should want their basketball (and football, and all sports) programs to become.
Has Greg Gard struggled to live up to the Bo Ryan standard? At times, yes, he has. However: Is Wisconsin toiling in mediocrity, failing to make NCAA Tournaments most years and sliding into comparative irrelevance? No, not generally. If we are going to say that Gard isn’t matching the Bo Ryan standard (which is a fair claim), it is also necessary to say that he isn’t missing the mark by a large margin. More precisely, if you look at the first five years of Bo Ryan’s tenure, Gard has forged a very similar body of work. Ryan’s UW career didn’t take off until 2007, when he piloted the Badgers to a top-four NCAA Tournament seed in seven of the next nine seasons. Ryan’s teams from 2002 through 2006 were decent yet incomplete teams, a lot like this 2020 group is now under Gard.
Bo Ryan took Wisconsin — in 2014 and 2015 — to heights not previously seen in the modern era of college basketball. Wisconsin did win a national championship, but that was in 1941, when the sport and the NCAA Tournament were both completely unrecognizable when viewed through a contemporary lens. It is impossible to compare that time to the 21st century. Bo Ryan was the Wisconsin equivalent of Billy Donovan, staying in one place for a very long time and building something special. After the coaching icon left, Wisconsin — like Florida — has struggled to maintain standards, but what hasn’t changed is that like Gainesville for Gator fans, Madison for Badger fans is an attractive and wholesome place to live, a community where Americans should want to raise a family.
Yes, Bo Ryan’s personal life was revealed in a dark and ugly way when he stepped down at Wisconsin. He and Billy Donovan do not share the same life story or the same personal reputation. This much can and should be noted, lest you get the impression that Ryan and Billy D are interchangeable cardboard figures. They aren’t. Yet, Ryan and Donovan obviously share the fundamental fact of staying in a place for at least 14 years (in Donovan’s case, 19) and creating three things:
- a dependable culture in which their successors, Greg Gard and Mike White, have continued to run clean programs;
- an expectation of success and a reality in which Gard and White, even in their worst seasons, still usually make the NCAA Tournament, which shows how high the floor for these programs has been elevated;
- a lot of wins, high NCAA seeds, and multiple Final Fours when they coached their respective programs.
Yes, Billy Donovan was talking to Florida fans on Saturday night, but the things he said should be listened to and absorbed by Wisconsin fans for some perspective.
Wisconsin basketball might not be in the best possible place it could hope for… but by golly, it is in a very good place. Two decades of building and hard work made that happen. What Billy Donovan did in Florida is something other men did in Wisconsin. Don’t lose sight of that when you realize how much has changed for the better in Wisconsin sports since the mid-1990s.
Billy Donovan could tell you that story.