Revitalized Penn State team offers new test for Wisconsin
MADISON, Wis. - The Penn State Nittany Lions did the No. 19 Wisconsin Badgers a favor on Wednesday when they trounced No. 17 Maryland 78-61 in State College, keeping the Badgers half a game behind the Terrapins for fourth place in the Big Ten with three regular season games left to play for UW.
But don’t expect the Badgers to get too chummy with the Nittany Lions when they come to the Kohl Center on Saturday for their second matchup of the year. The Badgers won their game in State College 71-52 back on Jan. 6, but Penn State looks like a different team this time around after winning five of their last seven games - including wins over two ranked teams: No. 6 Michigan and this week’s win over Maryland.
Of course, the Badgers are no strangers to taking on teams near the bottom of the conference who are on a hot streak. They already turned around a strong challenge from a resurgent Illinois squad earlier this month - but Penn State’s late season surge serves as a reminder that there are no easy games in the Big Ten.
“They’re a whole different team than when we first saw them in the beginning of the year,” sophomore point guard D’Mitrik Trice said after Wisconsin’s practice on Thursday. “The tempo, the lineup, the pace, the confidence that the guys are playing with is at an unbelievable rate right now. Kind of like how we played Illinois … they’re one of the hottest teams in the Big Ten right now.”
Penn State’s offense has really roared to life over their last three games, scoring 95 points against Nebraska, 83 points against Illinois, and then 78 points against Maryland - all above their season average of 70.1 points per game. The Badgers held Penn State to 52 points in their first matchup last month, and now they’ll have to try and see if they can put the lid back on top of their offense - and hold them close to the 37.7 percent shooting mark they allowed in the game.
“Penn State’s a great team,” sophomore guard Brad Davison said on Thursday. “They have obviously beaten some of the top teams in the league after getting off to a slow start but they were competitive in those games too. That’s the thing about the Big Ten - there are no easy games. Every game we’ve got to show up, it doesn’t matter if we’re home or away. We’ve gotta be locked in right from the start and show a sense of urgency. Right now they’ve got a lot of momentum going so we’ve got to make sure we start off fast and play our game.”
The Badgers will need to sustain that sense of urgency - not only in their game against Penn State, but in the weeks to come as well. Wisconsin’s regular season is almost at an end - and the pressure will be on for them to close out the year on a high note before they try and make deep runs in the Big Ten and NCAA tournaments.
The pressure is on now—in a way that it might not have been at this time last year when the Badgers were already all but ruled out of a ticket in to the Big Dance—but UW will need to take care of their business against the Nittany Lions in order to set themselves up for more success down the road.
“I think when you look at the calendar and see you have three Big Ten games left, two home games with the seniors, one road game before (the Big Ten tournament), the clock’s definitely ticking,” Davison said. “We’ve put in a lot of time, whether it was in the spring or the fall, the whole season to get to this moment. We like where we are, our goals are in front of us and we control our own destiny. We want this thing to end the right way - we don’t want it to end for more than a month.”
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John Veldhuis covers Wisconsin football, basketball and recruiting for BadgerBlitz.com on the Rivals.com network. Follow him on Twitter at @JohnVeldhuis.