Let's start this off with the good news: the Wisconsin Badgers don't have a single bad loss on their resume. The bad news, they have eight total losses. While they've countered those losses with three huge wins, and they are cruising towards the NCAA Tournament, not all those losses are created equal. They will be looked at and evaluated differently.
Let's dig into each loss and rank them from the most understandable to the most frustrating and worst for the resume.
8. 98-70 Loss to BYU in Salt Lake City
This goes down as a neutral court loss because it wasn't played in the BYU home arena; it was a road loss in reality. This is the least concerning loss because it was very early in the season, the team had yet to gel, and it was on the road fighting against a hostile environment. It's also a loss that's aged well with BYU being a top-15 team for a lot of the season and currently ranked NET 20.
7. 89-73 Loss to Purdue at home
It starts to spiral pretty quickly. This being a home loss is the only reason it's above BYU as a worse loss. However, Purdue is a NET 8 team, and at the time, and even now, it's a very understandable loss.
6. 90-60 Loss to Nebraska on the road
This one only looks bad because it's a loss by 30 points. Losing to a top-10 team on the road should never be a resume killer. This one definitely is not hurting Wisconsin at all. You'd have loved for Wisconsin to keep it more respectable, but it is what it is.
5. 86-69 Loss to Ohio State on the road
We get to the most recent one. It's not a bad loss at all in the sense of resume metrics. It's a loss to a bubble team, which is sitting at NET 38, on the road. It's a wash at this point. And nowhere near the losses that should be hurting Wisconsin. The frustration for fans is that it looks like the Badgers didn't really want to be there at the beginning of the game, and played with no grit.
This also fell at a point in the season when all the Big Ten is pulling off upsets and dismantling each other.
4. 76-66 Loss to Villanova at a neutral site
This was a close game and a hard-fought game that didn't go Wisconsin's way. It hurts more than the previous because Villanova and Wisconsin will end up with similar resumes at the end of the season and will be fighting for similar spots in the NCAA Tournament.
3. 78-77 Loss to Indiana on the road
This is purely ranked higher than the previous two because of how the game went. It's chalked up as the most frustrating game of the season. The whistle went one-sided at the end of the game, and Indiana walked away with an overtime win. It won't kill the resume, but it's a game that you can put as "this one sucked."
2. 73-71 Loss to USC at home
This one and the next one are both going to be used against Wisconsin come tournament selection time. This is officially Wisconsin's only quad-2 loss as it was at home against a NET 47 team. However, it's still a top-50 team, and thus it can't be in the category of "bad loss." Yet, it was a winnable game in which Wisconsin decided to give a lackluster effort for most of it.
1. 74-63 Loss to TCU at a neutral site
The debate can be had that the USC loss was worse because it's the only quad-2 game that Wisconsin lost. However, TCU is a worse team currently at NET 48 and will end up lower ultimately than USC. The neutral site is the only thing keeping it as a quad-1 loss.