Call it hard, physical play or call it refs with quick whistles, but in Wednesday night's contest between Wisconsin and UW-Green Bay, a whopping 47 fouls were called, leading to an unusually long game with the first half alone taking more than an hour to complete. The constant stoppages were met with disdain by players and coaches who felt they weren't able to get into a rhythm.
"The good thing about it is you get a chance to rest, but the bad side of it is that it can stop a team's flow," senior point guard Kammron Taylor said.
While Phoenix head coach Tod Kowalczyk said he believed it was difficult to judge the game due to all of the fouls, the Badgers welcome such a hard-fought contest as the team views such games as ideal toward building for the Big Ten season.
"A lot of the players from this team know players from Green Bay, and it's competitive," senior forward Alando Tucker said. "When they go home, they are going to have bragging rights for whoever wins."
Tucker also added that he believed the game was called very closely and very tightly because it was an early season matchup, and the officials are hoping to set a tone for fouls and what will be called right away.
"A lot of those fouls are questionable, but I think the refs are trying to make a statement early in the season," Tucker said. "I think that's pretty much how it went tonight."
Lights-out start
When the game went to its initial media timeout, just after the four-minute mark of the first half, the Badgers were lights out in jumping to a 14-4 lead, possibly leading to the shot clock on UW-Green Bay's basket to fail.
The flow of the game wasn't helped at all by the light failure, as the game was delayed several minutes before the officials decided to simply shut off Wisconsin's shot clock to be fair.
"Coaches were just telling us to stay loose," Taylor said of the unusual delay.
Once play resumed, it was hardly smooth sailing as the malfunctioning shot clock began to sputter incoherent digits and twice set off the buzzer, forcing the officials to once again stop play.
"The referees said they bought a cheap shot clock," Kowalczyk said. "I thought this was the Big Ten."
Everything returned to normal just after the eight-minute mark as the problem was solved during the second media break.
SI Jinx?
At the same time the Badgers were battling the Phoenix, No. 3 Kansas was in the process of being upset at home by Oral Roberts.
The Jayhawks were one of five teams to receive regional Sports Illustrated covers that hit the newsstands Wednesday, bringing up the possibility of the SI jinx myth.
"I'm not superstitious, so I don't believe in any jinx or things like that," Tucker said. "I think a lot of teams and a lot of players do look at rankings. Sometimes people get big-headed, players get big-headed, teams get big-headed."
That isn't to say that Tucker didn't appreciate gracing the cover, though. In fact, he didn't even mind being referred to as the sidekick of teammate Brian Butch, who appears on the cover with him, though it did draw a snicker from Taylor.
"It looks like I'm actually like 5-foot-2 in that; I'm going to have to talk to the guys that shot that photo," Tucker said. "I think it's great publicity for the school, for the University of Wisconsin. So as long as we're on there, it's good with me."
