The Boring Majesty of Bo Ryan's Dad Rock Basketball

Of course Bo Ryan's long-awaited breakthrough to the Final Four last season was set in the most extravagant sports stadium in the country. Dallas' AT&T Stadium is less a venue than a shrine to the concepts of opulence and excess, a platinum-plated trinket designed to be ogled more than actually experienced. It insists on being noticed, and insists on itself, in exactly the way that Ryan does not.

This was not the place for Bo Ryan and the stoic, metronomic, extremely effective form of basketball he has installed at the University of Wisconsin. But it was also the perfect place for it, and for him. Tests have proven that it is impossible to imagine Bane with a Wisconsin accent, but this would have been the place for it. In every way that matters, Bo Ryan was Dallas' reckoning.

Until last year, Ryan had never worked so late into a basketball season. Although, to be fair, he rarely goes home early. Wisconsin has made the NCAA Tournament in every one of his 14 seasons in charge, and only in 2006 did they fail to win a Tournament game. Ryan's teams are consistently very good, but he had not even reached an Elite Eight before 2014.

The Badgers beat Arizona to get there and then nearly did the same to Kentucky, which in most sectors passed for a kind of coronation. That or Wisconsin was a fluke, a team of plodders that needed an iffy foul call plus an injury to one of Arizona's best players to punch above its weight class before Kentucky restored order and knocked them out. That the Badgers may well have to go through the same two teams in the exact same rounds to get to this year's Final is something like March asserting a cosmic challenge of double-or-nothing.

There are biases that drive the skepticism of Ryan's Wisconsin teams, tacit and otherwise. The one that matters most, however, is the wary way they go about their business. Wisconsin basketball is the purest and most proudly uncool Dad Rock, down to the Bob Seger-iffic details: rhythm guitar licks reimagined as ball screens, with sound rotation principles for a two-note bass line and two-hand chest passes the backing beat. Wisconsin's best player looks like the oafish progeny of Adam Driver and Adam Sandler circa-The Wedding Singer, at least when he's not slipping past and scoring over sleeker-looking athletes; Frank Kaminsky's moment of badassery, after inflicting holy judgment on Arizona last season, was meekly informing Charles Barkley that he sometimes says mean things to himself on the court.

These are not things that inspire awe. Precision never merits fireworks without some undeniable—read: NBA-level—talent behind it, and while there stands a decent chance of Ryan's crew sneaking two players into the first round of June's Draft, that's remarkable only because it has never happened before in school history. Far more often than not, Ryan's difference-makers peak in Madison, instead of Madison Square Garden. This should not matter, but it matters quite a bit in the context of college basketball players being valued less as independent commodities than hors d'oeuvres for the NBA's boffo dinner party. Quality is equated to who makes it at the next level, which often does not overlap with who actually plays the best. It is performance, not production. John Calipari has claimed to assess his teams by how many of his players he can get to the next level, and this is not at all strange or wrong.

But the Calipari method will never be Bo Ryan's. He is 67 years old and coaches in a state that churns out top-level athletes only a fraction as well as it does dairy, and rarer still ones powered by quick-twitch circuitry as opposed to cheese curd-fueled, offensive line diesel. Ryan is, at this point, unlikely to change what has brought him so far, and will never be able to out-athlete the competition with what he has on hand.

So Ryan does what he does. He roots his players below the rim and orchestrates an offense that flows at the pace of an IV drip. For this, he is accused of being boring, a label that's impossible to prove categorically but which nevertheless carries a hefty weight in value judgment. He's far from alone in succeeding by such means, of course. The Spurs of the early 2000s and the Nebraska Cornhusker football powerhouses of the 1990s have navigated these waters, as have any number of Italian soccer dynasties. Where they differ is the matter of choice.

Professional teams have the financial means and collectively bargained right to reshape their rosters on the fly. Contracts and the relative strengths of their personnel limit how they play, of course, but nothing but common sense is standing in the way of the Spurs trading Tim Duncan for a stack of draft picks used on raw, gangly wing players. Tom Osborne's Cornhuskers teams were a college outfit subject to the same rules as Wisconsin, but at their apex they were also destination school for some of the best athletes in the country. There was an agency to their tedium; they kept providing reasons not to alter a thing.

Ryan, conversely, has no real alternative. He only lucks into occasional blue-chip athletes who happened to be born inside the state's borders, and even that's happening less and less; Wisconsin is operating at the highest level in program history, buoyed by perhaps the greatest season in program history, and still Ryan has gotten his clock cleaned in recruiting by Marquette for several years running. As long as he coaches the Badgers, Wisconsin will never be cool, and for the same reasons that All Tomorrow's Parties doesn't book Bob Seger.

Ryan uses what he has, which has been enough to get Wisconsin much further than anyone coaching there ever has or likely ever will. So many coaches— Mike Krzyzewski is the most obvious—are hailed (and hailed) for leveraging past success as a way to change their programs' styles and identities. Bo Ryan's genius lies in how his teams reaffirm every stereotype and limitation that's ever existed about Wisconsin, and succeed in that affirmation. That the teams are, honestly, somewhat boring to watch is not a bug. It is their defining feature.

This will not stop people from changing the channel when the Badgers are on, and that's fine for everyone but CBS. But Bo Ryan will keep playing the Dad Rock hits, because he knows they work. Those who stick around to watch will be treated to a special type of hoops virtuosity, rare and sharp and strange. The rest can turn the page.