Wisconsin Basketball Coach Bo Ryan Announces Immediate Retirement

According to the school, Ryan’s assistant of 22 years, Greg Gard, will assume the role of interim coach.

The 67-year-old coach abruptly retired on Tuesday night, 12 games into the season after his Badgers beat Texas A&M-Corpus Christi two weeks before Big Ten play begins. In 15 years, Ryan won 82% of his games as head coach at UW-Platteville, helping the Pioneers to four national titles.

Wisconsin has struggled this season, as it’s off to a 7-5 start.

Effective immediately, associate head coach Greg Gard will take over in place of Ryan. His record commanding the Platteville Pioneers was especially impressive: During his tenure as coach, the team won four NCAA Division III national championships and became the winningest NCAA team of the 1990s, posting a 266-26 record.

Wisconsin scored 15 points over a stretch of eight possessions, ending with a 3-pointer by junior guard Zak Showalter that gave the Badgers a 50-35 lead with 8 minutes, 56 seconds remaining.

“Wish I could argue with you one more time”, Dekker wrote. “But I couldn’t make the decision at the time”.

Gard was a candidate for the vacant Phoenix Head Coaching position the last two times it was vacant, but did not get the position. The good news here is that the Badgers don’t have a scholarship senior on the roster, with six of their scholarship players being freshmen.

Ryan initially implied, if not said, he’d retire after the 2015-16 season and that he wanted Gard to succeed him.

“I’m sure I’ll have more to say later, but it’s extremely hard”, Ryan said Tuesday night, according to the program’s official Twitter account.

Alvarez said about Bo Ryan, “He has put our basketball program on the map”. From the day he was hired at UW-Madison in 2001, Ryan was a coach with confidence. “And I don’t know how many coaches ever have the opportunity to have an AD and an administration that understand and respects that”.

This time, though, Ryan has made himself very clear. That surpasses Hall of Fame coach Phog Allen, who racked up a 746-264 career record over his career, with the last 37 years of his time coaching the Kansas Jayhawks from 1919 to 1956.

Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez also addressed the team following the game and told them not be afraid of change, dusting off parts of a speech he’s used on the football team twice in the last three seasons following the departure of head coaches.

Gard doesn’t feel too much pressure from being put in a sort of “test” season. That’s the great challenge, not only in this league but in college basketball now: “sustaining a certain level of play”.