Wisconsin defeated Texas A&M–Corpus Christi 64–49 last night.

That wasn’t the news. This was, from Madison.com:

University of Wisconsin men’s basketball coach Bo Ryan announced his retirement following the Badgers’ 64-49 victory over Texas A&M-Corpus Christi on Tuesday night.

About 20 minutes after the final buzzer, Ryan walked into the Kohl Center media room. An athletic department official announced Ryan would make an opening statement, something he almost never does.

Ryan went on to say that he would step aside immediately. UW associate head coach Greg Gard, Ryan’s longtime assistant, will take over the team on an interim basis and will coach his first game when the Badgers close non-conference play with a game against visiting UW-Green Bay on Dec. 23.

“It’s so emotional right now,” Ryan said. “And I’m trying to hold this together.”

Ryan ends his 32-career on the college level with a 747-233 record, including 364-130 at UW. He led the Badgers to at least a share of four Big Ten regular-season championships and three conference tournament titles.

The Badgers advanced to the NCAA tournament in each of Ryan’s first 14 seasons, with seven trips to the Sweet 16. UW entered this season coming off back-to-back Final Four appearances, including a loss to Duke in last season’s title game.

“His record speaks for itself,” UW athletic director Barry Alvarez said. “He’s a legend.”

Gard, who turned 45 earlier this month, has been an assistant under Ryan for more than two decades.

Ryan announced over the summer that this would be his 15^thand final season at UW, but he later said that might not be the case after all.

Ryan ended up emulating former UW coach Dick Bennett, who abruptly retired during the season following Bennett’s 2000 Final Four run. UW replaced Bennett with Brad Soderberg, who then was fired after the Badgers’ one-and-done NCAA run. (Soderberg was replaced by … Bo Ryan.) It’s also analogous to legendary North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith, who abruptly retired at the start of the 1997 reason, leaving North Carolina with no choice but to name his top assistant, Bill Guthridge, as coach.

It’s also analogous to legendary North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith, who abruptly retired at the start of the 1997 reason, leaving North Carolina with no choice but to name his top assistant, Bill Guthridge, as coach. Guthridge went to two Final Fours in three seasons. The most recent long-time coach to retire in-season is Jim Calhoun, who hung up the whistle in September 2012, leaving UConn no alternative but to name assistant Kevin Ollie. UConn won the national title in 2013, so those two moves worked out better than Soderberg, who was then fired after five seasons at Saint Louis. (Soderberg now is an assistant at Virginia, about which more shortly.)

Dan Dakich gave Ryan high praise when he named his own coach, Bob Knight, the most successful Big Ten coach, and Michigan State’s Tom Izzo the most successful post-Knight coach, but said Ryan did the “Best Job Ever Done at a School.” Like Bennett before him, Ryan maximized what he had, not only becoming the career win leader at UW, but improbably getting one team to a Final Four and last year’s team to the national championship game. Given Wisconsin’s long history of recruiting players no one has ever heard of, and players that don’t continue long in pro basketball, that’s remarkable.

Sports Illustrated’s Seth Davis adds:

Bo Ryan never did master the art of subtlety. When he had an opinion, he expressed it. When he developed a position, he stuck to it. When he faced criticism, he insisted he didn’t care. And when he believed something should happen, he did everything he could to make it so.

Last spring, in the wake of Wisconsin’s second consecutive run to the Final Four, Ryan, 67, decided he had had enough. He wanted to retire while he could still flirt with a single-digit handicap. Having decided it was time to walk away, Ryan knew exactly who he wanted to replace him: his assistant and friend for 23 years, Greg Gard.

Two developments, however, scuttled his plan. The first was the declining health of Gard’s father, Glen, who a few months before had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. With Gard devoting so much time and energy in helping his father’s fight, Ryan felt conflicted about whether he was ready to take the reins, especially considering the Badgers were facing a daunting rebuild.
The second development took Ryan off-guard. His athletic director, Barry Alvarez, balked at the idea of naming Gard the head-coach-in-waiting. He agreed Gard should be on the short list of candidates, but Alvarez wanted first to conduct a national search, one that would presumably also include Virginia coach Tony Bennett, who grew up in Wisconsin, played for Wisconsin-Green Bay and whose father, Dick, coached the Badgers for six years.

Perhaps Ryan anticipated Alvarez would go along with his plan because Alvarez executed a similar one when he stepped down as Wisconsin’s football coach in 2005. Alvarez had recently also taken on the title of AD, and he named then-defensive coordinator Bret Bielema the heir going into Alvarez’s final season. Having learned of Alvarez’s intentions, Ryan tried to hedge his bets. He put out a statement in June saying that he would coach one more year, and that he hoped Gard would succeed him.It only took 24 hours for Ryan to start backtracking. He was at a golf outing (naturally) and started jabbering with some reporters, and pretty soon he was reminding them that he hadn’t retired officially, and that he had a rollover five-year contract, and heck, maybe he would just keep right on coaching a few years more. He later insisted this did not contradict what he had said in his statement the day before. That was balderdash, of course, but there it was. When Bo said up was down, then by golly up was down.

Ryan’s congenial stubbornness is what made him an effective coach as well as a likable one. When you spoke with or interviewed Ryan, you always felt he was a little bit annoyed, but that he still enjoyed a healthy give-and-take. He was the last guy to leave a party, not because he was a big drinker, but because he loved to mix it up with the fellas. It was easy to see why his players tried so hard for him. He could bust their balls and still leave ’em laughing.

Ryan’s record at Wisconsin will not soon be matched. During his 14-plus years at the school, the Badgers never missed out on the NCAA tournament. Not once. This from a school that prior to Ryan’s arrival had played in a total of seven NCAA tournaments, and four in the previous 55 years. His teams also never finished lower than fourth in the Big Ten. He won with players who were not heavily recruited coming out of high school. That meant many stayed in Madison for four years and got a little bit better each season. It was not a common formula, but then again, Ryan is an uncommon man.

To be sure, each of those streaks was likely to be broken this season. Tuesday night’s win over Texas A&M-Corpus Christi only improved the team’s record to 7–5. (Wisconsin lost its previous game at home to in-state rival Marquette; you know Ryan would never have let that be his valedictory.) The Badgers have lost at home this season to Western Illinois and Milwaukee. Their best win, on Dec. 2 at Syracuse, was over a team in free fall. I’m sure it is tempting to get snarky and say Ryan is leaving because he couldn’t handle the losing, but I seriously doubt that was the driving consideration. Ryan’s has never been a conventional thinker. Why would he start now?

No, this decision, and the timing, was about one thing and one thing only: giving Greg Gard the best possible shot at being his replacement. It’s an age-old trick, one that was pulled off by North Carolina’s Dean Smith and UConn’s Jim Calhoun, who retired so close to the start of the season that their respective AD’s were forced to name their top assistants as successors. (In UConn’s case, Kevin Ollie was given an interim tag, but he was made the permanent head coach a few months later.) Gard’s struggle ended sadly in October, when his father passed away at the age of 72. Ryan wanted to wait until the right moment to drop the news on his team and the public. That moment came Tuesday night.

And when Bo Ryan wanted to seize a moment, he seized a moment. Alvarez, now boxed in, had no choice but to name Gard as interim replacement. We all recognize this for what it is—a three-month audition to become the next head basketball coach at the University of Wisconsin. If Alvarez names someone else, he will be disappointing a lot of people, not just in Wisconsin, but around the country—basketball people who respect Gard’s commitment and appreciate his loyalty to his boss and the program. He will also, of course, be disappointing Bo Ryan.

As he wrapped up his moving soliloquy Tuesday night, Ryan apologized to the assembled media, saying he had to leave because there were important people he still needed to talk to.

“I’ll see you down the road,” he said.

That sure didn’t sound like goodbye. As Ryan stepped off the stage, literally and figuratively, it was in the same manner in which he coached. He did it His Way, and for His Guy.

Alvarez is arrogant enough to not care about “disappointing a lot of people, not just in Wisconsin, but around the country.” I have always wondered how much friction — which has been rumored, but never reported — there has been between Alvarez and Ryan since Alvarez didn’t hire Ryan. Alvarez has stuck with coaches he has hired more so than his predecessor, Pat Richter, did — for instance, men’s hockey coach Mike Eaves (after a horrible 2014–15 season amid dropping attendance and major questions about the direction of the program) and women’s basketball coach Bobbie Kelsey (now 45–84 in her career, hired after Alvarez fired Lisa Stone despite four consecutive winning seasons).

Wisconsin’s history of high-profile coach hires consists of one name: Stu Jackson, hired by Richter in 1992. Jackson got one high-profile recruit, Rashard Griffith, and his two seasons netted a National Invitation Tournament berth and UW’s first NCAA tournament berth since 1947. Then Jackson left to return to the NBA, and his assistant, Stan Van Gundy, was fired after one season that underwhelmed despite the presence of Griffith and Michael Finley, UW’s all-time leading scorer. Richter hired Bennett largely due to alumni demand, and Ryan was a similar hire after two years at Milwaukee that followed four national championships at UW–Platteville, after Rick Majerus considered and then turned down the opportunity. (UWP hired Ryan from UW, where he was an assistant to Bill Cofield. I have sometimes wondered if UW should have skipped Steve Yoder and hired Ryan in 1982, though it seems unlikely he would have become the coach he became given the mess that was the UW Athletic Department through most of the 1980s.)

Gard is not beginning in a great situation as demonstrated by the Badgers’ losing to two in-state rivals, Milwaukee and Marquette, and an inexcusable home loss to start the season. One can question, though, whether Wisconsin is an attractive destination to top-tier coaching candidates. The next coach will not be Oregon native Shaka Smart, now at Texas. Would Tony Bennett, who played for Dick and coached for Ryan, want to leave Virginia, where basketball is the number one sport in the number one basketball conference in college basketball, to come to UW? Saul Phillips, another former Ryan assistant now at Ohio, might be considered, but is he high-profile enough for Alvarez? What about Milwaukee coach (and former player for Ryan at UW–Platteville) Rob Jeter, fresh off beating the Badgers?

The question the rest of this season may answer is how much of UW’s success during Ryan’s career was attributable to Ryan’s system and how much was attributable to Ryan himself. That’s a hard statement, but Gard himself said last night that he’s never had more than a one-year contract.