Name: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Location: Madison, Wisconsin
Founded: 1848
Enrollment: 51,822 students for Fall 2025, with 37,198 undergraduates
School Colors:
Cardinal and white, officially, but no one is going to yell at you if you say red and white.Nickname: Badgers
Why “Badgers?” Wisconsin was dubbed the “Badger State” because of the lead miners who first settled there in the 1820s and 1830s. Without shelter in the winter, they had to “live like badgers” in tunnels burrowed into hillsides. It’s
just a hop, skip, and a jump from there to naming the sports teams of the flagship university after the state’s nickname.
Notable Alumni: No one interesting or important has ever graduated from UW-Madison.
Oh, come on. FINE.
John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club; former Major League Baseball Commissioner Allan H. “Bud” Selig; hockey players Chris Chelios, Brianna Decker, Meghan Duggan, and Hilary Knight; John L. Savage, chief engineer of Hoover Dam; professional poker player Phil Hellmuth; US women’s soccer star Rose Lavelle; Arthur C. Nielsen, Sr., founder of the Nielsen television ratings company; Olympic speed skater Eric Heiden; Academy Award winner Don Ameche; Harry Crane, head of television at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce; Jerome Chazen, co-founder of Liz Claiborne; film composer Alf Clausen; actress Carrie Coon; astronaut Jim Lovell, best known as the commander on Apollo 13; actor Tom Wopat, best known as Luke Duke on The Dukes Of Hazzard, children’s author Kevin Henkes, perhaps best known for Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse; actress Joan Cusack; actress Jane Kaczmarek; William S. Harley, founder of Harley-Davidson; Ben Karlin, Emmy winning producer of The Daily Show; 14 Nobel Laureates; Donald Goerke, the inventor of SpaghettiOs; Tom Skilling, meteorologist for WGN in Chicago; Steven Levitan, co-creator of Modern Family, amongst other television shows; director/producer Michael Mann; author Stephen Ambrose, probably most famous for Band Of Brothers, the book that inspired the HBO mini-series; directors/producers David & Jerry Zucker, best known for their work on Airplane!; and finally, Mary Brunner, member of the Manson Family and ex-girlfriend of Charles Manson.
Campus Traditions: Pretending that they own the complete and full rights to House of Pain’s ‘Jump Around,’ suspending the marching band because they don’t know how to behave after being warned; interrupting graduation ceremonies to play ‘Jump Around’ because they think they own it, yelling at teenagers on Twitter because said teenagers don’t want to go to their school, illegally acquiring shoes, yelling at teenagers on Twitter because said teenagers changed their minds about going to their school, getting paid millions of dollars to trip and fall, failing to help a star player play a home game as a senior, microwaving parrots, quitting your job in the middle of the busy part of the year, failing to out-slow Virginia, spending hundreds of dollars on custom clothing and then being sad that no one noticed, missing the NCAA tournament for 46 consecutive years and then pretending that never happened after making the tourney for 10+ straight years, burglary, being a millionaire and calling teenagers soft, harassing stenographers who are just trying to do their damn jobs, being a pantsless freak who Facebook stalks women and as a result has no friends on campus, punching basketballs into teammates’ faces, and finally, using Photoshop to try to pretend that they have a racially diverse campus.
Last Season: 27-10, with a 13-7 record in the Big Ten, plus a loss to BYU in the second round of the NCAA tournament.
Final 2024-25 KenPom.com Ranking: #12 out of 364 teams
Final 2024-25 BartTorvik.com Ranking: #12 out of 364 teams
Preseason Poll: The Big Ten doesn’t do a team poll. However, the Columbus Dispatch and Indianapolis Star think that’s trash, so they put together a media poll. Wisconsin was picked to finish seventh in the 18 team Big Ten.
This Season: 6-2, falling by 28 in Utah to BYU and by 11 to TCU in San Diego. The Badgers are 1-0 in the Big Ten after beating Northwestern, 85-73, at home on Wednesday night.
Current KenPom.com Ranking: #27, down from their preseason position of #20
Current BartTorvik.com Ranking: #31, down ever so slightly from their opening night position of #30
Returning Stats Leaders
Points: John Blackwell, 15.8 ppg
Rebounds: Nolan Winter, 5.8 rpg
Assists: John Blackwell, 2.2 apg
Current Stats Leaders
Points: Nick Boyd, 20.9 ppg
Rebounds: Nolan Winter, 9.4 rpg
Assists: Nick Boyd, 3.3 apg
Head Coach: Greg Gard, in his 9th full season as Wisconsin’s top man and 10th overall. He has a record of 194-108 overall and 104-71 in Big Ten play.
Bigs? Yes, but give me a second to make a note here. There is no one on the Wisconsin roster listed between 6’7” and 6’9”. Three guys at 6’6”, then three at 6’10”, and two at 7’0”. That’s wild, right?
Anyway, Wisconsin comes out of the gate at you with one of the 6’10” guys and one of the 7’0” guys in the starting lineup. You already guessed at one of them, and Nolan Winter is the taller of the two with that team high in rebounds. He is currently a double-double waiting to happen as the #3 scorer behind Nick Boyd and John Blackwell, averaging 13.1 points per game. Winter has a double-double in four of UW’s eight games this season, although he missed the feat in both of their last two contests. 12 points on Wednesday against Northwestern, 10 rebounds against TCU, but missed the other side of it in both contests.
Austin Rapp is the 6’10” guy in the starting lineup for 7 of Wisconsin’s 8 games, and at 238 points, he’s actually three pounds heavier than Winter. He’s also definitely the guy you’d identify as the stretch 4 in the lineup, as he’s second on the team in three-point attempts so far this season and his rebounding rates are lagging way behind Winter. Rapp is only hitting 31.9% this season, and he needed a 3-for-6 night against Northwestern to climb up that high. He connected on 35% for Portland last season, so bouncing back can’t be considered a surprise.
The 6’10” guy in the lineup on Wednesday? Freshman Aleksas Bieliauskus, making his first career start, although he had played at least 11 minutes in every game except for the opener. Wisconsin isn’t exactly counting on him as a load bearing pillar yet at 3.5 points and 4.1 rebounds per game, but Bieliauskus is rebounding at a pretty great clip when he’s on the floor and he’s willing to step out and shoot it once a game at least even if he hasn’t found his touch out there yet at 27%.
We’ll probably also see freshman Will Garlock, who measures in at 7’0” and 243 points. The Middleton product has played in every game so far this season, although he’s been in the single digits in minutes for the last five games.
Shooters? As a team, not really. Wisconsin currently ranks #178 in the country in three-point shooting percentage, which is kind of a problem because only 12 teams take a higher percentage of their shots from behind the arc. Only one of the Madison starters has been a reliable shooting threat this season, as John Blackwell is cashing nearly 42% of his attempts this season. He’s putting up nearly seven a game, more than half his total field goal attempts, so the Golden Eagles have to be ready for that early and often. The only other obvious threat is Tulsa transfer Braeden Carrington, who is draining 42% of his 3.3 attempts in 15 minutes per game off the bench. The catch there is that Carrington is a 31% career shooter and is coming off a 33.6% year with the Golden Hurricane last year. Given the other guys on this roster that are starting and scoring in double digits for Wisconsin, it’s possible that Carrington’s role has been reduced to “stand there and wait to be open,” and since he’s attempting just one two-pointer per game, that seems pretty likely. If that’s his deal, then it certainly seems possible that he’ll keep shooting it pretty well.
From there, it’s a “when should we be concerned?” situation. Nick Boyd shoots nearly six threes a game, but he’s just under 33% after hitting 35% for San Diego State last season. I already mentioned Austin Rapp’s lackluster shooting this year but solid history of connecting. Jack Janicki comes off the bench for 18 minutes a game and his shooting is up to 31.8% this year after just 28% last season. Virginia transfer Andrew Rohde is an absolute mess out there, firing nearly four three-point attempts per game and hitting less than 27%. He was a 41% shooter for the Hoos last year but just 32.3% for his career. Nolan Winter is shooting a comically bad 15% on 2.5 attempts this season, but he hit nearly 36% last year, and since he’s the big man in the middle, I’d image that Greg Gard is fine with him trying to shoot his way out of this problem because of 1) history and 2) the rotation problem that he causes.
What To Watch For In EGG BOWL BEDLAM: As you can kind of guess, if Marquette catches Wisconsin on a day when the threes aren’t falling, this could easily tilt towards the Golden Eagles. UW shot 25% on threes against TCU and 24.1% against BYU. Both of those squads would appear to be better than MU this season, so there’s that part to consider, but the Badgers also shot at least 35% on threes in every other game this season except for their 97-72 win over Northern Illinois.
TCU also managed to frustrate Wisconsin in 17 turnovers for a rate of 23%. If the Golden Eagles can have quick hands, either in passing lanes or digging on doubles on the bigs, that can be a big help. MU generated a turnover on 24% of Wisconsin possessions last year, and I think we can all agree that it’s not like Greg Gard has massively revamped his offensive system from last year. To a certain extent, the same game plan applies, especially when John Blackwell accounted for one-quarter of UW’s turnovers by himself last year.
To pivot to a “Marquette has to do things” aspect of Wisconsin, the Badgers got burned by hot shooting in both of their losses. Those are their two worst three-point shooting defense games of the year at 41% for BYU and 57% — on just 14 attempts! — for TCU. The catch there is that Marquette has shot over 33.3% on long distance shots just twice this season. That’s real bad, and at this point, there is literally no one on the roster that anyone trusts to shoot threes regularly. That trust mark comes in at 33.3%, which is the same as shooting 50% at the rim in terms of points earned by the shot. No one is over that mark right now with the exception of Michael Phillips…. but he goes from 5-for-11 to 2-for-8 when you take out the rapid-fire 3-for-3 he had in the very last two minutes of the game against Southern.
And let’s wrap up on the word “trust.” If you watched the Valparaiso game, you may have noticed that head coach Shaka Smart didn’t trust Zaide Lowery to play any more after his 0-for-3 start to the second half. Lowery left with 16 minutes and change to play and never returned, not even in overtime. Damarius Owens got onto the floor for three minutes in the first half, committed an atrocious two-handed shove foul at the free throw line elbow on a rebound, and was never heard from again. That was Owens’ sixth single digit minutes appearance of the season and third game in the last four where he played three minute or less, including a DNP-Coach’s Decision against Oklahoma. Josh Clark was a -9 in four first half minutes and that was it for him on Tuesday night, so it’s real hard to argue “hey, play the guy that can catch lob dunks from Chase Ross & Nigel James!” Royce Parham missed all three of his three-point attempts, committed three turnovers and four fouls, and he might qualify as one of the five players that is worthy of being in the Circle Of Trust right now.
Yes, I’m dropping this part out to give it a paragraph to itself: Caedin Hamilton paired a career high 10 rebounds with 1-for-5 shooting, two turnovers, and an offensive rating of 62 per KenPom.com. That is his fifth sub-100 (read as: below average) ORtg of the season, and he did that on a night where 1) He played a career high 26 minutes and 2) Marquette was in a knock-down, drag-out fight with a team that lost by 16 to Southern Indiana. After the game, Shaka Smart told Homer & Tony on the radio that “when Caedin’s mind is clear, he’s our best rebounder.” Let me tell you, dear reader: It was not a fun time to hear that via podcast while I was operating a motor vehicle the next morning.
This is neither a historically great or historically awful Wisconsin team. It’s a Badgers team that currently projects to finish 11-9 in the Big Ten and maybe wander into the NCAA tournament as a #8 seed. They’re fine. Marquette, on the other hand, is looking increasingly lost by the game (check out the slide on the Torvik Game Scores) and seems to be rapidly running out of players that the coaching staff trusts and the fans like to watch. If they go into the Kohl Center and collectively play their best 40 minutes of basketball of the season, they can find a way to beat this Wisconsin team.
If not? It’s going to get ugly in a hurry.
All-Time Series: Wisconsin leads, 71-60.
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