What You Need To Know Before Wisconsin Plays Duke In The National Championship

Everyone give yourselves a round of applause. We finally made it to the end of the 2015 college basketball season, and there’s only one game to go for all the Tostitos madness. (Little known fact: the winner of the national championship claims ownership of all the madness on the earth.)

Your brackets are busted, your favorite team is at home eating submarine sandwiches, and you’re stuck watching two teams you don’t even really like all that much playing for a title your school definitely deserved.

Don’t worry, we can still all enjoy the game tonight if we try hard and we believe in ourselves. And if we have these few fun facts in our back pocket to impress our friends. Isn’t that what life’s all about?

Duke last won the title in 2010.

We like anniversaries here at UPROXX, and this is the five-year anniversary of the last time Duke won a national championship. Before that, Duke had not been in the championship since winning it all in 2001. With Coach K up over 1,000 wins for his career and in his 35th year as head coach of the Blue Devils, this might be the last great chance he has at winning one more of these.

This would be Mike Krzyzewski’s fifth National Championship.

Coach K is currently tied with John Wooden for the most Final Four appearances ever with 12. A fifth title would move Krzyzewski into sole possession of second place all time with five championships. He’s currently tied at four with former Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp. Unfortunately, K has a long way to go if he wants to make it to first all time. John Wooden won 12 of these things.

Bo Ryan has won some championships of his own.

Although Ryan is going for his first NCAA Division I title, the Wisconsin coach is no stranger to winning trophies. While at Wisconsin-Platteville, Ryan won four Division III titles, the last coming in 1999. He then made the jump to Milwaukee for a couple years before taking over in Madison. After a loss to Maryland in February, the Wisconsin coaching staff showed this year’s team a DVD of the 1992 and 1995 Platteville squads to try and hammer home what the Badgers are trying to do in Ryan’s system.

Via Daniel Uthmann of USA Today:

While Ryan and Gard sat in the back of the room and were reminded of how simple their system looked when it was working, Wisconsin senior guard Josh Gasser said he and his teammates were reminded of a point Ryan occasionally makes: Even though his Badgers players are more talented than his Pioneers team, they won’t win without following the same fundamentals.

Some players didn’t need a reminder from their head coach. Sophomore forward Nigel Hayes said, “Him showing us that was him just saying, ‘We didn’t play great offensively,’ and to us we were like, ‘OK, we’re still being talked about as one of the best, most efficient offenses in the country. I’m sure we don’t need to watch the swing offense from 19-whatever. We know how to play offense.’

But Wisconsin hasn’t won a national championship in basketball since 1941.

This is the second straight year Wisconsin has made the Final Four, but the first time the Badgers have made the championship game since they won it all in 1941. This is usually the part of these sorts of articles where I list a bunch of things that happened in 1941 or told you how much gas was, but I’m not Google and I’m not your Dad, so do it yourself. The Most Outstanding Player in the 1941 tournament was John Kotz, who was a member of the Sheboygan Red Skins for a brief time after college. Wisconsin won that national championship over Washington State, 39-34, so feel free to insert your Big Ten scoring joke here. All-American Gene Englund did have an awesome quote after the game, though.

“Reading the newspapers, it was as though we were only going to Kansas City for the train ride,” Englund said. “That riled me up.”

For 1941, that’s basically Englund throwing the mic across the room, swearing a bunch of times, and mooning the entire postgame press conference.

Wisconsin is still really good at giving great quotes.

If there’s been any extremely fun element of this Wisconsin run other than watching how pretty the Badgers’ offense looks when it’s clicking (and it has been clicking pretty much throughout the whole tournament), it’s been how goofy and ridiculous each of the Wisconsin players have been acting at the podium. Nigel Hayes keeps saying huge spelling bee words to fool the stenographer. There was that whole “She’s beautiful” moment from Hayes as well.

The players are college kids, and kids like to do dumb stuff and be silly, and sometimes we lose that in this whole regimented “they have to act like professionals out there but we’re not going to say they’re professionals and even the implication that they deserve to be paid is worthy of me stomping my feet and throwing a fit because that’s not how the game is supposed to be played gosh darn it” run-on sentence that is the some people’s idea of college athletics. I’m glad the Badgers are acting this way. Sports are supposed to be fun. We take sports too seriously. We take life too seriously.

Silly or not, Frank Kaminsky is really good.

Nothing he does is normal, whether he’s eating confetti, rubbing the Big Ten trophy, or simply just out there playing on the court.

The natural reaction is “Well, how is his game going to translate to the NBA?” You worry about that after tonight. It doesn’t matter right now. He’s not in the NBA yet. Let’s just watch him do stuff, generally infuriate anyone who isn’t a Badgers fan, and find a way to flail around, make tough shots, get in the lane, hit huge jumpers and be really good. Kaminsky didn’t just fall into winning the Naismith Award this year. He averaged 18.7 points and 8.1 rebounds and shot 55.1 percent. This guy is an unbelievably good college player.

And that matchup against Jahlil Okafor is going to be great.

Coach K had a point in the lead up to the game. This isn’t a boxing match, so individual matchups get hyped up too much and don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, especially when there are times when those guys won’t even be guarding each other.

That being said, the comparisons are going to be made, and these are two of the best players in the country going head to head. Kaminsky is the senior who stuck around to win a title. Okafor is the freshman and sure-fire Lottery pick who might be a one-and-done. Watching Kaminsky score in creative ways and Okafor use a variety of post moves to get his points should be a lot of fun even if this is a rematch of a game from way back in December that Duke won 80-70 in the Kohl Center. Both teams are very different now from what they were back then.

While you’re watching Okafor and Kaminsky, don’t forget about everyone else.

Justise Winslow could be a top 10 pick and is one of the most uniquely gifted athletes in college basketball. Quinn Cook makes crazy faces and has become a true leader.

Tyus Jones always seems to come up huge in big moments. And there’s a Plumlee (because of course there is). That’s just Duke. Wisconsin has Hayes and Gasser and Dekker and Bronson Koenig and others.

Sure, seeing Duke play Kentucky would’ve been something special, but the rematch between the Blue Devils and the Badgers offers so much fun potential on its own. Something tells me we’re not going to be lacking for enjoyment in this game.