Friday, November 21, 2008

Huh

I think Wisconsin men's basketball fans, myself definitely included, may have gotten a bit overconfident after Tuesday's beat down of SIU-Edwardsville. And that's because the Badgers just had to go to overtime to beat Iona. Of course, since the game wasn't broadcast anywhere, there's no way to know what was going on really. Although from reading uwbadgers.com's blog entries, it sounds like UW went absolutely ice-cold in the second half, hardly scored for long periods of time, got whistled for a ton of fouls, and was down four points with a minute or two left. Then they gutted it out, tied the game, started playing decent defense, getting a few foul calls and making some free throws. Though not enough to make it comfortable-- they won by two, 60 to 58. Phew.

San Diego beat Valpo, so UW will play them on Sunday evening in the semi-finals of the illustrious Paradise Jam. The game will allegedly air on some derivation of Fox College Sports, apparently Channel 617 on DirecTV, but we'll see. San Diego is the team that beat UConn in the tournament last year, and has returned all five of their starters. They've lost once this season, a 5-point season opening loss at UNLV, where they were missing three starters, including all all WCC player. Yeah, all three of those guys are now back. They did only beat Valpo by seven, earlier today, but still-- Sunday's contest should be a very tough one. And you can't have a lot of confidence in Badgers after tonight's near loss. Thankfully, the season is long, this team is pretty young and still getting its act together, and has lots of potential. There's a lot of time to get better.

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