Today’s obligatory Final Four Post o’ the Day is from USA Today, which compares UW’s Final Four team to Bo Ryan’s five Final Four teams at UW–Platteville:

When Sam Dekker tried — and failed — to catch a pass with one hand the other night, Saul Phillips knew what would come next. The buzzer sounded. Another Badger entered the game. Dekker went to the bench. Bo Ryan followed him to his seat.

“Anybody who ever played for Bo knew what Bo was gonna tell him,” said Phillips, who played for Ryan at Wisconsin-Platteville and now is the head coach at North Dakota State. ” ‘Catch the ball with two hands!’ There are a lot of people out there who’ve experienced the exact same message.”

And now they’re experiencing the exact same euphoria. Since Wisconsin’s 64-63 overtime victory against Arizona sent the Badgers to the Final Four for the first time since 2000, much has been made of Ryan finally getting there, too. Right or wrong, it’s been cast as validation for the coach, as though the demarcation between good and great was the scissor snipping down the nets after a regional final.

Ryan has downplayed the accomplishment. But to those who knew him back when he built an NCAA Division III program into a four-time national champion, it’s huge.

“All of us from Platteville are proud of him,” Phillips said. “It’s as big of a deal to us as to his immediate family, because we’ve all known he was this good.”

They’re also proud to see Ryan has built Wisconsin’s program in the same way as he did at Wisconsin-Platteville, where the Pioneers won four national championships in 15 years: tough, overlooked kids, precisely executing fundamentals as simple as the proper way to throw and catch the basketball. The Badgers begin each practice by practicing just that, and it could be a bunch of middle-schoolers learning the game.

Or those kids back at Wisconsin-Platteville.

“It’s the worst thing in the world,” said Travis Schreiber, who played on two undefeated national championship teams for the Pioneers. “We would do ‘partner-passing’ to the point where our backs were sore. But you knew the value of the ball. You knew those little things meant a great deal. When you get to the Final Four level, the margin is very slim.” …

“He had some darn good teams at Platteville,” Ryan’s wife Kelly said Saturday night, recalling fondly the buses filled with fans that would follow the Pioneers. “People would say, ‘It’s (only) Division III,’ and I’d say, ‘You know what? The trophy is the same. Division I or Division III, it looks exactly the same.’ ” …

They also see the same system. There’s no one-to-one comparison to [center Frank] Kaminsky, of course. But in the head-fakes, the ball-fakes, the spins and especially the pivots, Schreiber and others see the four post moves taught with great precision by Ryan: the Moses (a drop-step), the Dominique (a step-through) the Sikma (a reverse pivot) and the McHale (a jump hook).

And that’s not the only thing. In the Badgers, they see the same close-knit chemistry they had in Platteville.

“The way the guys love each other and the way ‘Coach’ loves his players, that’s always been the case,” Schreiber said. “There’s really good camaraderie. You’ve got the right people in the locker room who are tough, and the right people who are funny.”

That apparently includes Ryan. Current players praise his consistency, and say he sometimes says things they don’t get, “but at the end of the day,” Dekker said, “it works.”

“What he said was never wrong,” said Phillips, who worked for Ryan at Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Wisconsin, and says Ryan has “a gift” for teaching. “In terms of teaching basketball, everything that comes out of his mouth, if you let your ego go, he was right.”

Phillips said Ryan always seemed to have the right thing to say, too. And sometimes it wasn’t instruction. Like the time when one of Ryan’s three daughters — Phillips wouldn’t disclose which — went through a brief phase when she was 3, or maybe 4, when she wanted to be a dog. She spent one game crawling, growling and barking on the other side of the gymnasium, in full view of, well, everyone.

After committing a turnover, Phillips was yanked from the game, just as he expected. But as he stewed on the bench, Ryan crouched, looked him in the eye, and then delivered the perfect message for, in Phillips’ self-description, “a high-strung kid who wanted to be better than I was.”

“You think you’ve got problems?” Ryan told Phillips. “My daughter thinks she’s a dog.”

Two weeks ago, Ryan got a technical foul toward the end of the first half of the Oregon game. He reportedly went into the locker room and asked his players who the greatest defender on the Badgers was. His answer: “I am.” After his technical foul, Oregon hit only one of the two technical free throws, and Ryan pointed out that meant he actually had stopped a Duck from scoring. As you know, the second half went better than the first half, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this.

More on Ryan at UW–Platteville from this fine publication. And if you get Sports Illustrated, you will get …