I don’t need to sit here and tell you that the Wisconsin Badgers got thrown around like rag dolls by the Purdue Boilermakers on Friday night in West Lafayette. Let Wisconsin coach Greg Gard tell you directly:
“That (3-point shooting) was secondary to how we couldn’t clean up the glass on the defensive end. That ignited Purdue and gave them a lot of confidence. You keep getting cracks at it, you’re eventually going to make a shot. They were quicker to the ball than we were.
“You continue to give `em crack after crack after crack. We rotated guys in. It’s not that we didn’t talk about it for two days straight constantly, knowing that they were the No. 1 offensive rebounding percentage team in the conference, it was going to be a battle and always is. We didn’t do a good job of matching physicality.
“That tells me we weren’t physical enough.”
It wasn’t even close.
Purdue’s number of OFFENSIVE REBOUNDS — 16 — matched Wisconsin’s TOTAL number of team rebounds.
Purdue was plus-14 on the offensive glass, 16-2, and plus-26 overall, 42-16. Brad Davison was Wisconsin’s leading rebounder. That is a bad indicator in and of itself. The fact that Davison had only four rebounds is even worse.
Purdue’s Evan Boudreaux outrebounded Wisconsin’s ENTIRE starting five, 13 rebounds to 10.
When we explained why this result was such a disaster for the Badgers on Friday night, these facts and statistics help illustrate the point. If Wisconsin played its typically rugged defense and lost a 58-54 game which was right there to be won at the end, we could say that this team’s identity was still intact and that it just needed to make a handful of additional plays to win games.
With Wisconsin getting completely outhustled and outmaneuvered for loose balls — Purdue also claimed eight steals in this game compared to only three for Wisconsin — the Badgers lost their identity as a blue-collar team. Wisconsin won’t always shoot well (the Nebraska game was clearly an aberration), but the Badgers had set a good example in January of consistently working hard. Friday night, they did not, and we all saw what happens when Wisconsin doesn’t work hard enough.
This is completely unacceptable, and it needs to lead to a furious, fierce effort on Monday in Iowa City.