Wisconsin is not favored to defeat Kentucky in the NCAA men’s basketball semifinal Saturday.

Why might the Badgers win? It starts with coach Bo Ryan. Myron Medcalf explains:

Freddie Owens didn’t trust Bo Ryan, who will lead Wisconsin to its second consecutive Final Four matchup against Kentucky later this week.

Not at first.

Ryan left UW-Milwaukee to coach Wisconsin in 2001. During his first practices with his new team, the basketball fundamentalist from Chester, Pennsylvania, instructed Owens, then a 6-foot-2 point guard for the Badgers, and Wisconsin’s other perimeter players to venture into the post for the first time in their careers.

Um … OK, Coach?

“I didn’t know what to think of him,” said Owens, most recently an assistant at Utah Valley University. “When he started teaching us how to post up, I thought he was crazy. I’m a point guard. I’d never posted up in my life. I’m used to coming off ball screens. And I’m in the post, and I’m working on Kevin McHale [drop-steps].”

For more than 30 years, Ryan has espoused the same message from pulpits at UW-Platteville (Platteville, Wisconsin), UW-Milwaukee and Wisconsin. His Platteville guys will tell you the same thing that his UW-Milwaukee guys will tell you about him. And his Wisconsin guys will confirm it all.

Ryan’s knack for developing blue-collar players such as Owens — a contrast from John Calipari’s grab-every-McDonald’s-All-American-in-sight, Minute-Rice approach — stems from his constant emphasis of the basics, his cerebral maneuvering that sprouts confidence and accountability in the locker room, and consistency.

“He’s obviously got me much more disciplined as a player and as a person, realizing [that] the little things in life go a long way,” Sam Dekker said. “And if you wake up each morning with the mentality that you have to get better … you can do a lot in that 24-hour span to improve and build on your life. You know, if you wake up every day like that, you’re going to get a lot of things done.”

By the end of his time at Wisconsin, Owens enjoyed the paint. He felt comfortable there, and he finally understood why Ryan taught his point guards post moves. And he benefited from an expanded skill set.

Ryan is a purist who preaches efficiency and versatility at all positions. His practices commence with simple passing and catching drills. He demands proper ballhandling and ball rotation. Want to see Ryan spaz? Commit a turnover in practice or throw a pass from midair.

He values stingy, hands-free defense. Sometimes, his players spend entire chunks of practice, without a basketball, shadowing one another like cornerbacks in man-to-man schemes. His father coached youth football, so Ryan has always had a jones for the gritty, gridiron types: tough, smart, relentless.

That’s the kind of player that Ryan craves. Those are the athletes who want more for themselves than any coach could ever desire on their behalves. He convinces his players, the unheralded kids and the rare blue-chippers too, that if they fall short of their potential, they’re only failing themselves, not him.

“I feel as though I got better as a college player, obviously, more so than in high school,” Owens said. “That’s the thing with him. You can look back during his whole time at Wisconsin. Every player that played under him left a better player, skill-wise and numbers. The main thing with him is he gets you to believe you’re capable of doing the things you want to do. He does the most to dig those goals out of you, to push you past those limits to get to the goals you have for yourself.”

It’s unfair and inaccurate to suggest Ryan recruits only overlooked two- and three-star recruits. Devin Harris was Wisconsin’s Mr. Basketball, who committed to former coach Dick Bennett. But he blossomed into an NBA first-round draft pick under Ryan. Brian Butch was a McDonald’s All American selection. Jon Leuer was a top-100 prospect who now plays for the Memphis Grizzlies. Dekker, a five-star recruit, would have been on every powerhouse’s wish list had he not decided to commit to Wisconsin after his sophomore season in high school.

On this season’s team, Nigel Hayes was a top-100 prospect before he arrived, and North Carolina‘s Roy Williams expressed his admiration for Bronson Koenig, whom he recruited in high school, during the buildup to last week’s Wisconsin-North Carolina meeting in the Sweet 16.

But most of those athletes were local products who wanted to play for the Badgers and stay home. Ryan has built his legacy on the under-the-radar types who’ve developed into elite performers.

Alando Tucker wasn’t a nationally coveted recruit, but he left Wisconsin as an All-American and NBA draftee. Jordan Taylor and Mike Bruesewitz led the Badgers to the Sweet 16 in 2012. Traevon Jackson was ranked 68th among shooting guards in the 2011 recruiting class per RecruitingNation. He was the starting point guard on last year’s Final Four squad.

“Bo is going to get the most out of you,” said former Wisconsin guard (2005) Sharif Chambliss, now an assistant at UW-Milwaukee. “He’s not going to accept you taking breaks. He’s not going to accept you turning the ball over.”

It started at Platteville.

Ryan didn’t have the recruiting budget or the access to players he has now. He had to teach college courses at the non-scholarship, Division III school, too. With limited time, Ryan had to pack valuable information into his sessions. But he never force-fed those teams. They watched film. A lot of film. And they discussed and implemented Ryan’s strategies in morsels instead of mouthfuls.

“Well, it was my first chance to be a college head coach, so I was putting together a system that I had in my mind of what I wanted to do, offensively, defensively, and then tweak it a little bit as I go along,” Ryan said. “It kept getting better because guys would buy in because they’re paying for their own education so they had to really want to be there.”

It worked. In the 1984-85 season, Ryan’s first Platteville squad finished with a 9-17 record. Three years later, the Pioneers were 24-5 and conference champions. Platteville won the first of Ryan’s four Division III national championships in 1991.

Rob Jeter, a captain on that 1991 squad, said Ryan’s concepts became religion to his teams. Proof? Whenever they played pickup ball together, they’d run the swing offense.

“We just played the same way all the time,” said Jeter, head coach at UW-Milwaukee. “I think the biggest thing with Coach [Ryan], you always knew where you stood with him. There was no guessing. It was always clear.”

Ryan’s strategic expertise has been an essential tool in his ability to help players reach their peaks, as are his psychological tactics.

Chambliss led Penn State in scoring before he transferred to Wisconsin in 2003. Ryan often conveyed his expectations to Chambliss and his teammates via indirect criticism. If Chambliss and former Wisconsin star Kammron Taylor had botched a play, Ryan wouldn’t rip them. He’d warn the rest of the team.

“He told somebody else, ‘If you all keep turning the ball over like [Taylor] and [Chambliss], you’re gonna be sitting on the sidelines,’” Chambliss recalled. “In a family culture like that, it definitely feels like you’re not pulling your weight. Everybody at Wisconsin, you’ve gotta pull your weight.” …

“I’m a completely different person and player than I was four years ago, and I think a lot of that has to do with coach,” said Frank Kaminsky, the Wooden Award favorite and NBA prospect who averaged 1.8 points per game and 7.7 minutes per game as a freshman in 2011-12. “He knows how to get the best out of us, from the time we step on campus to the time we’re seniors. He really makes a commitment to us. It’s hard to put into words how much he actually does for us, because you start to realize in these times how much he has an effect on us, the way we say things, the way we do things on the court, how we interact with each other. It’s really just a true, great program.”

The other reason is difficult-to-defend players, as Robert Mays points out:

As Sam Dekker’s impossible 3 fell from the height of the shot clock through the bottom of the net, Rondae Hollis-Jefferson’s shoulders dropped. It was Dekker’s fifth — and the Badgers’ 10th — 3-pointer of the half, and with the lead now at eight, it was the final dagger in Wisconsin’s West Regional Final win over Arizona. After the shot went down, Badgers senior Josh Gasser turned to announcer Reggie Miller for some affirmation.

“I said, ‘Sam’s got stones like you,’” Gasser said.

“Kidney stones,” coach Bo Ryan interjected, trying to keep things family-friendly.

“Kidney stones, yeah,” Gasser said. “I don’t know. He laughed. He agreed with me. He gave me a good head nod.”

All tournament — from Frank Kaminsky hitting SportsCenter in capri sweatpants to Nigel Hayes’s stenography fascination — it’s been obvious that no one has been having more fun than Wisconsin. Saturday was proof. This was a team that’s done it before and knew what it would take to do it again. This team can turn it up, and this time, it turned it way up.

“That was cold-blooded,” Ryan said about Dekker’s dagger. “I can tell you that.” He was talking about one shot, but he could have been talking about nine others. No matter how Arizona tried to defend Dekker and Wisconsin in the second half Saturday, the ball was going in. “I think they had two 3s at the half,” Arizona coach Sean Miller said after the game. “Think about that. Two made 3s at the half, and they had eight in the second half.” When the moderator corrected him, it still seemed hard for Miller for believe.

Wisconsin’s offensive display — 55.6 percent from the field, a scorching 12-of-18 from 3 — would be a sight against any team this deep in the tournament, but putting on that sort of show against Arizona made it all the more remarkable. The Wildcats were among the best defensive teams in the entire country, led by a pair of excellent wing defenders and defined by constant, stifling ball pressure. In the first half, Wisconsin was scraping for buckets on just about every possession. Kaminsky, as he had so many times before, was getting his against Arizona’s defense, but the rest of the Badgers went into halftime with only 17 of Wisconsin’s 30 points.

Despite finishing with a career-high 27 points, Dekker was quiet for most of the opening 20 minutes. His seven first-half points came in unspectacular ways — an easy lob inside, a trip to the line, a lucky putback off a bad Kaminsky miss. It wasn’t the slashing, rim-attacking version who had a career-high 23 against North Carolina two days earlier. Twice after the game, Dekker brought up the challenge of finding lanes against Hollis-Jefferson and Stanley Johnson. And with Johnson on him for much of the first half, Dekker rarely looked to put the ball on the floor.

What he did instead was put the final touches on his most complete weekend as a college player. Offensively, Dekker’s biggest limitation, both this year and last, has been his ability as a 3-point shooter. After hitting less than 33 percent from behind the arc as a sophomore, he checked in at 33.8 percent this season. His 5-of-6 showing on Saturday was comfortably the best 3-point performance of his college career. And when that shot is falling, it turns Dekker into a serious problem for any defense.

The game he had against North Carolina saw Dekker taking anyone he pleased off the dribble. “[I] try to be an attack-first guy,” Dekker said Saturday. “I have the ability to use my athleticism. Sometimes I don’t use it the way I should, and when I’m in tune with that and doing it and using it to my advantage, it makes the game come a lot more smoothly and naturally.” At times against the Tar Heels, he looked like a 6-foot-9 running back, tucking the ball away as he barreled toward the rim. That’s a trick typically reserved for guys built like Derrick Rose, not small forwards with a wingspan pushing seven feet.

Even with his ability to put the ball on the floor and finish, the best part of Dekker’s game is what he does without the ball in his hands. He’s a fantastic cutter, always moving and seeking out easy buckets. It’s the exact sort of trait that makes him so valuable to his team. At the same time, Dekker knows why a lot of those cuts are open to him. “It also helps to have this guy next to me getting a lot of attention,” Dekker said, nodding Kaminsky’s way.

Dekker was named the most outstanding player of the West regional, but for the second straight year, Frank the Tank burned Arizona’s season down. Sean Miller’s team had no answer. Three Wildcats tried their hands at guarding Kaminsky; none of them had much luck. Typically, a player with talents as varied as Kaminsky’s tries to find the perfect tool to take advantage of what a particular defender lacks. With his ability to handle the ball, opposing big men have little chance stopping him off the dribble. And with his ability on the block, smaller, quicker players just don’t have a chance down low. It’s gotten so Kaminsky doesn’t even think like that anymore. “I don’t really care who is guarding me at this point,” he said afterward.

Concerns about whom he can guard — Kaleb Tarczewski had his way a couple of times on the block, and for all of Kaminsky’s strengths, quickness is not one of them — will persist as people ponder Kaminsky’s NBA future. But his sheer level of skill is remarkable. And it goes beyond being able to step out and shoot. At this point, he can do it all, against anyone. His game defines Wisconsin’s offense because of how he breaks defenses — even the best ones. Now, he and the Badgers will get a shot at the best defense anyone has seen in a long, long time.

Kentucky is one of the only teams in the country better than Arizona on that end of the floor, and the difference between the Wildcats in blue and the ones in red is that Kentucky may have the array of big bodies to slow Kaminsky down.

If they can, that’s where Wisconsin’s peaking new star may come in handy. A team that went to the Final Four a year ago and scored better than anyone in America did it without Dekker hitting the level he’s reached this week. That’s a frightening thought, and sadly for Sean Miller, one he had to experience firsthand. “When Sam Dekker does what he did — and I think some of the shots were very well defended — when he does that with Kaminsky, maybe Kentucky is that school that can beat them,” Miller said. “But I’m telling you, I don’t know if there is another one out there when they’re clicking with that one-two punch.”

I assume Kentucky will win Saturday night. It is interesting, though, that ESPN.com‘s survey of NCAA coaches and assistant coaches predicted a Badger win.