PORTLAND, Ore. – Wisconsin men’s basketball wanted to be remembered for its fight.
“It’s a group of fighters,” UW guard Braeden Carrington told the Journal Sentinel in the locker room shortly after the Badgers’ early exit from the NCAA Tournament. “I think people counted us out early in the year and didn’t expect us to even be in this position in the first place.”
Wisconsin forward Nolan Winter similarly wanted fans to remember this group for “our competitiveness each and every night.”
Even in the wake of Wisconsin’s stinging first-round exit, a WDJT-TV camera picked up point guard Nick Boyd saying they “got to keep fighting” as he walked back to the locker room for one last time in a Wisconsin uniform.
But Wisconsin’s 2025-26 fight once again ended prematurely with the fifth-seeded Badgers’ 83-82 loss to 12th-seeded High Point in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
Yes, it is the infamous five-12 upset. Yes, High Point is a good team, as evident by its 31 wins and competitiveness against fourth-seeded Arkansas in the second round. But in a bracket where the 19 other teams seeded No. 5 or better advanced at least to the second round, UW’s season followed an all too familiar script.
The Badgers have now suffered three first-round losses, three second-round losses and two March Madness absences since their last Sweet 16 trip in 2017. That alone stings for a frustrated fan base.
But how tantalizingly close this group appeared to be to changing that may make the 2025-26 shortcoming sting even more.
Wisconsin won four games against teams ranked No. 10 or higher in the USA TODAY coaches poll at the time, and the road win at Purdue was just outside the top 10 at No. 14. (Greg Gard surpassed Bo Ryan for most all-time wins against top-10 foes with 19, with Michigan State’s Tom Izzo saying Gard does not get enough credit after the 18th win.)
The Badgers advanced to the Big Ten tournament semifinals and even gave then-No. 3 Michigan a serious scare while they were without Winter. If that’s what Wisconsin could do without Winter, one could be forgiven for dreaming about what Wisconsin could do in Portland and beyond with Winter.
“We thought we could do so many things, and we thought we could make a deep run in this tournament,” Wisconsin guard Andrew Rohde said.
Boyd – albeit while making a different point to reporters that “you guys wrote us off sometimes” – said that the Badgers eventually “had a lot of y’all believing we were going to the Final Four.”
Instead, the Badgers ended their season with a lot of what-ifs.
Perhaps the most obvious what-if was the unfortunate bracket draw. High Point, in hindsight, was probably underseeded at No. 12 considering how competitive the Panthers were in the second round as well. The other No. 12 seeds lost in the first round by margins of 26, 20 and 10 points.
The other obvious what-if is the final minute – and more specifically, Boyd’s final two heavily-contested misses in the one-point loss. But one does not have to look far for others.
If Wisconsin had not blown a 12-point lead at home against USC or dug itself in such a hole early against Villanova, the Badgers theoretically could have earned a more favorable spot in the bracket. The same goes for an Indiana game that went down to a pair of controversial calls.
If Wisconsin’s defense was not so lackluster – with an adjusted defensive efficiency that ranked worse in 2025-26 than in any of UW’s previous seven seasons – the Badgers might not have been so susceptible for an upset, whether it be the late-season loss against Oregon in Eugene or the High Point loss farther north on I-5 in Portland.
“Obviously, I think we have to lock it in on defense,” Wisconsin guard John Blackwell said. “It starts as soon as we come in next year. And just take more pride in it.”
Of course, even being in the position to be upset in the first round was an improvement from earlier in the 2025-26 season.
Many bracket projections had Wisconsin outside the tournament field in late December and early January – and with good reason considering UW’s 0-5 record in Quad 1 games before the first of the aforementioned top-10 wins on Jan. 10.
“We stayed with it,” Boyd told reporters in the UW locker room. “A lot of people wrote us off. You guys wrote us off sometimes. And we kept going.”
That was, of course, until the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament.
“Obviously going out like that – it’s sad,” Rohde said.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin basketball’s early March Madness exit ends season of what-ifs
Reporting by John Steppe, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
