NCAA Basketball: Ohio State and George Mason headlines latest Sunday Mailbag
By Bryan Mauro
Will Greg Gard lose the locker room again if Wisconsin goes into another tailspin? – Patrick Madden (@TheSportsJD)
It is really hard to say what is going to happen at Wisconsin this year. Full disclosure is that I don’t think Wisconsin is very good and they are one of the youngest teams in the country. They went from an average age of 24 years old a season ago to an average age of 19 this season. The Badgers don’t have much in the way of proven scorers other than Brad Davison. Coach Gard is going to have to do his best work as the head man of Wisconsin this year if they are to be successful.
In reference to losing the locker room, outside of one player in Kobe King there really isn’t much solid evidence that Gard ever really truly lost the locker room. King transferred and is no longer associated with the Wisconsin program and while he did take some parting shots at Coach Gard and the Badger program the rest of the players on the roster seemed to be very engaged and bought in. That was evident in last year’s win in the NCAA tournament. That Badgers team was strong and had tons of veteran leadership, they were winning, and winning cures everything,
The 2021-2022 Badgers are talented. They are also extremely young and inexperienced in the College game. Wisconsin starts a freshman point guard in Chucky Hepburn who is going to be a great player for Wisconsin but this team is going to need to rely on Davison and Jonathon Davis to carry them, depth will be a problem, and they likely are not going to win too many games. When teams start losing games that is when the locker room problems start coming to the forefront and players transfer and leave the program scrambling.
It is hard to say if that will happen again this year. Gard appears to have learned from his previous actions. At least, the outside observer seems to have a very close team that trusts each other. Even still Wisconsin will likely struggle this year.