Wisconsin is a tough road win. Nobody knows this more then the Buckeyes who went there last year ranked #1 and got beat. Jared Sullinger led the Buckeyes with 24 points, Deshaun Thomas added 16 and William Buford had 11. The Badgers started the game by not double teaming Sullinger, and the big guy took advantage.

“I don’t think I saw single coverage since first part of the season of my freshman year,” Sullinger said. “When I saw that, I got excited. I decided to go to work.”

“What happened last year is last year,” said Sullinger, who became the 48th Ohio State player to score 1,000 career points. “We won, and that was the main goal.”

Jared Berggren was the poor soul assigned to defend Sullinger. He had these comments, “I let him get a couple of easy ones early, and that set the tone,” Berggren said. “A great player like him, once he gets a little bit of confidence, he’s hard to stop. A lot of it came early on. I let him get going. I’ve got to take a little blame myself for that one.”

“Bo Ryan is a great coach, I’m sure he had a strategy that he knew he was going to work,” Buford said. “Me personally, I don’t think you should put just one person on (Jared). That’s just me personally.”

After the Badgers but the lead to 51-50, Buford hit a three pointer for a 54-50 lead. It was the only three the Bucks hit all day long. “I’ve got great faith in William,” Ohio State Coach Thad Matta said. “That was a big, big-time shot for us.”

“It was kind of big because no one ever won here,” Buford said. “This is my last time coming here. Of course, I wanted to get the win, and coach Matta, I’ve never seen him so happy.”

“Well, I’m going to state the obvious: it’s a great win. I think when you look at Wisconsin basketball, it has stood the test of time. How many times we, and a lot of other teams, have come in here and gone home without a win—it definitely is a good win for our program. But with that said, we’ve got eight more Big Ten games to win, and they’re going to all be just like that. And I told the guys, “Let’s enjoy this until we get back and we’ll get ready for the next one,” Matta said.

The Badgers also struggled from the three point line going 5-27. When asked about if he was nervous that the Badgers would get hot from three, Coach Matta said, “I was nervous because, percentage-wise, we wanted to make sure we were guarding guys and if you remember what happened in here last year… I’m going to change my answer—I was nervous as hell every time they let it go because of those guys making those shots and they have great form. They had good looks, they just didn’t go down for them.”