Landry and Hughes lift Wisconsin past Penn State

Stanley Pringle and the rest of the Penn State Nittany Lions won an enormous amount of respect on Saturday afternoon in Madison, Wis., but the Wisconsin Badgers walked away with their second Big Ten victory of the season.

In a riveting contest featuring outstanding individual performances on both sides, Bo Ryan’s ballclub avoided a stunning upset at the Kohl Center because Carl Landry and Trevon Hughes wouldn’t accept defeat. Landry, a senior forward, and Hughes, a junior guard, scored 14 of the Badgers’ final 17 points, carrying the home team to a hard-fought 65-61 triumph against an inspired opponent from Happy Valley. The escape job will give Wisconsin a certain degree of relief in the short run, but the day’s most significant big-picture story is the emergence of Penn State’s basketball program.

Before detailing the heroics of Landry and Hughes, it has to be said that the Nittany Lions are showing signs of becoming a real factor in the Big Ten race. Last year’s club won seven conference games, a huge improvement from the 2-14 mark posted in 2006-‘07. After winning this season’s league opener against Northwestern on Wednesday, Ed deChellis’s team improved to 12-2, and everyone in Big Ten country wanted to know if the Lions could be taken seriously. PSU didn’t defeat a single team of appreciable quality in the non-conference portion of its schedule, so as the visitors walked into an arena where Bo Ryan has lost all of two conference games this decade, the skeptics were out in force. Penn State basketball had to come up with an impressive performance in order to create forward momentum for the program.

This was one of those games that will not look good to those who only see the score, but for a team down 20 at the break to come back against anyone and win, it is an emotional lift and one of those games that can bring a team together and lead to bigger and better things down the road. A 5-1 start is better than most fans predicted, but this coming week will tell us a lot about where Michigan basketball is at this early point in the season as the Wolverines face Maryland (who trounced Michigan State last week) on Wednesday on the road, followed by a rematch with Duke at home on Saturday. Win or lose, how Michigan competes in these next two games will go a long way to showing whether they are a team that is ready to contend for an NCAA tournament berth and a Big Ten title.

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