NCAA Basketball: Ranking best head coaching hires from the year 2001

3. Bo Ryan (Wisconsin)

It may be hard to imagine, but prior to the turn of the century, Wisconsin basketball wasn’t exactly a hot commodity. In college basketball’s infancy, Wisconsin pulled home a national title way back in 1941 but made less than half a dozen NCAA Tournaments between then and 2000. While Dick Bennett had led the program to a surprise Final Four run in 2000, he was gone a year later and the Badgers needed someone to carry that momentum and turn it into long-term progress.

Enter Bo Ryan, who had proved he knew a thing or two about winning in the state of Wisconsin. Himself a former Badgers assistant several decades earlier, he had spent 15 years as head coach at Wisconsin-Plateville, winning four D3 national titles with the program. The last two years had been spent beginning the rebuild at Milwaukee, a rebuild that Bruce Pearl took to the next level in the years following his exit. Come 2001, Wisconsin had their new voice, and Ryan turned this into one of the Big Ten’s best programs.

Ryan would spend 14 full seasons with the Badgers, with every one of those seasons ending with an NCAA Tournament trip and an above .500 record in Big Ten play. His Badgers finished at least 4th every season in the conference and made Final Four runs in both 2014 and 2015, his final two full seasons. He retired and turned things over to Greg Gard in December 2015, though his legacy with the program is undeniable, nearly tripling their all-time NCAA Tournament appearances and establishing this long-dormant program as one of the best in college basketball.