Bo Ryan leaves Wisconsin: ‘I’ll see you down the road’

That would have left the Badgers in the best shape moving forward for whomever took over the reins, be it Gard or someone else.

Gard pledged Ryan won’t “vanish off planet Earth, and I’ll make sure I still have his phone number”.

The Ryan-Gard partnership spans more than two decades, to when Ryan was in the process of building an NCAA Division III national powerhouse at UW-Platteville and the latter was a college student chasing a dream. “He has done it in a class way”.

Bo Ryan had the feeling coming into the season that the time to step down was approaching. I’ve been there myself… They’ve got great fans, they’ve got a system to what they do and I can see them just continuing.

The numbers and records you will continue hearing over the next few days and weeks in reference to Bo Ryan can only hint at the mark he is leaving on Wisconsin’s program and the state of the game in Wisconsin itself. He is a legend. “He’s a legend. He’s a hall of famer”, Alvarez said.

Gard is serving as the head coach in on an interim basis. And though Alvarez declined Tuesday to commit to Gard longterm, it’s clear Gard will at least have an opportunity to prove himself worthy of becoming Wisconsin’s coach. Gard insisted he is fine with that.

Gard, 45, claims to be accustomed to the pressure of coaching for his job every year. “It’s sad when a coach the magnitude of Bo steps down”.

“He’s a great basketball coach, but he’s an outstanding human being”, Rickrode said. The baton has been passed. Here’s a guy who truly worked his way up the ladder, being so good at what he did on the lower rungs as a coach that everybody had to respect him.

For Ryan, the winningest coach in the school’s history with 364 wins, the decision to retire was “months in the making”.

Sam Dekker, a member of the Badgers’ back-to-back Final Four teams the past two seasons who’s recovering from back surgery during his rookie season with the NBA’s Houston Rockets, was resting at home while watching his team play the Sacramento Kings when he noticed the news about Ryan on Twitter.

“I talked to Coach Ryan twice in the afternoon, and he indicated this was the direction he was going, Gard said”.

Under his watch, Ryan won seven Big Ten titles, and his conference winning percentage (.717) is the best in Big Ten history. This place has come a long way in a lot of facets…. “This year, it’s always just really about trying to focus on getting this team to improve as quickly as possible”.

“I take that responsibility that comes with all that extremely seriously”.

The game’s annals will ignore the timing or the current struggles of a Badgers team that opened this season an unimpressive 7-5.

“Shocked? I don’t know”, Paris said. “He was a point guard on the floor, and you could tell that it was going to be in his makeup for the future, that this is what he wanted to do”.