MIDWEST REGION
CHICAGO – Like his team, Kammron Taylor has had better halves than the one he endured yesterday at the United Center. Actually, Taylor has rarely, if ever, been worse. Likewise, Wisconsin looked so abysmally bad in the first half, it was in real danger of turning into a first day NCAA Tournament casualty.
Taylor attempted six shots in the first half and missed ’em all in 19 fairly pathetic minutes. The Badgers weren’t quite that bad, but they were close. They shot 6 of 29 and, with 5:29 remaining before halftime, looked up at the scoreboard and saw a shocking sight:
Texas A&M-Corpus Christi 25, Wisconsin 7.
“Kind of reminded me of Steve Martin in ‘The Jerk,’ ” Wisconsin coach Bo Ryan said. “That’s the way our offense was going.”
The highly-regarded Badgers of the mighty Big Ten, ranked sixth in the nation, were getting run out of the gym by a little-known outfit competing in its first NCAA Tournament.
“This was not the way we wanted to go out, the way we were playing in the first half,” Taylor said. There was relief in those words. Lo and behold, Taylor and Wisconsin got straightened out and order was restored. Taylor scored all of his game-high 24 points in the second half, hitting seven of nine shots as the Badgers shook off a terrible start with a torrid finish for a 76-63 victory in a Midwest Regional game.
As a No. 2 seed, Wisconsin (30-5) moves on to face No. 7 UNLV tomorrow afternoon and as the Badgers advance they realize they can’t dig such a deep hole if they want a long-term stay in this tournament.
“That’s the beauty of basketball, it’s 40 minutes, and we played the whole 40 minutes . . . or 25 minutes,” said senior forward Alando Tucker, who added 23 points.
That’s about right. It was 10-0 barely three minutes in, 17-4 after seven minutes. It was an 18-point lead for Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and an upset was brewing.
“They brought it . . . they were ready to play,” Tucker said. “We played bad, probably as bad as we’ve played.”
A steal by Taylor led to a dunk by Tucker as Wisconsin closed to 27-19 at halftime. It was only a matter of time. Tucker pumped in 10 points but then took a seat with three fouls. Enter Taylor. He hit his first shot of the game, a 3-pointer, and immediately followed up with another to pull the Badgers even at 47-47. That started a run of 12 straight Wisconsin points for Taylor.
Wisconsin scored 57 points and shot 58 percent in the second half, proving too big and strong for a novice tournament team from a school that sits on an island in the Gulf of Mexico.
“Once you get ’em down, you’ve got to go for the jugular vein,” Islanders coach Ronnie Arrow said. “We just didn’t finish it. We thought we could wear them down by getting up and down the court. In the second half they wore us down by pounding.”