It’s an even year, so the Golden Eagles host the Badgers at Fiserv Forum.
Name: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Location: Madison, Wisconsin
Founded: 1848
Enrollment: 52,097 this fall, with 36,902 undergraduates
School Colors: Cardinal and white, officially, but no one is going to yell at you if you say red and white.
Appropriate use of names: It’s hard to argue with their decision to call the red “cardinal” since, as AE Editor Emeritus Rubie Q once pointed out, Wisconsin fans have become the St. Louis Cardinals fans of college sports.
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,’ 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: 22-14 overall and 11-9 in Big Ten play after starting out the year 16-4 and 8-1. The Badgers lost eight of their last 11 regular season games a year ago, still found a way to get to the Big Ten tournament title game anyway before falling to Illinois, and then gave up a pair of huge runs to James Madison in the first half of their NCAA tournament game and never had a chance after that.
Final 2023-24 KenPom.com Ranking: #17
Final 2023-24 BartTorvik.com Ranking: #25
Preseason Poll: The Big Ten doesn’t do a preseason poll internally, but the Indianapolis Star said “screw you guys” and did a media poll. Wisconsin finished tied for 12th in the 18 team league with Nebraska.
So Far This Season: Definitely looking like they won’t finish 13th in the Big Ten. Wisconsin started off the year with eight straight victories, including toppling then-#9 Arizona at home and then UCF and Pittsburgh in a strangely wallpapered hotel auditorium in West Virginia. However, they are currently tied for last place in the Big Ten because they lost their league opener at home to Michigan on Tuesday.
Current KenPom.com Ranking: #36
Current BartTorvik.com Ranking: #39
Returning Stat Leaders
Points: Steven Crowl, 11.2 ppg
Rebounds: Steven Crowl, 7.3 rpg
Assists: Steven Crowl, 2.1 apg
Current Stat Leaders
Points: John Tonje, 22.3 ppg
Rebounds: Nolan Winter, 5.6 rpg
Assists: Steven Crowl, 3.1 apg
Bigs? For the 17th 4th consecutive season, I have to talk about Steven Crowl. I think I will be free of this prison after this year, but who can truly say. The 7’0”, 248 pound Minnesotan is having, to this point of the year, his worst year as a starter for the Badgers. Crowl is posting four year lows in minutes, points, field goal percentage, three-point field goal percentage, two-point field goal percentage…… but at least the low minutes are causing him to shoot less given those shooting percentages. He’s still pulling in over five rebounds per game, but KenPom.com shows him down in rate on the glass on both ends, so it’s not just the minutes that are causing a dip from last year’s 7.3 caroms. Crowl is posting a career best (and team high!) 3.1 assists per game right now, which makes his #290 assist rate the only nationally ranked rate on the roster.
Nolan Winter starts alongside Crowl, but plays even fewer minutes at just 20.7 per game. After hovering just on the edge of being a real rotation guy last season, the 7’0”, 235 pound Winter is chipping in 9.4 points and a team high 5.6 rebounds per game. My sum total of watching Wisconsin this season is “the last several minutes of the Pitt game” and “the last several minutes of the Michigan game,” so I don’t have a feel for whether or not Crowl and Winter actually play together a whole bunch other than the start of the game. With neither guy clearing past 25 minutes per game, I tend to think they don’t, but we’ll find out together, I guess. Like Crowl, Winter will step outside and shoot a three every so often, but unlike Crowl this season, Winter is hitting 40% of his attempts.
Another fun reason why I don’t think Crowl and Winter play together….. is because Wisconsin doesn’t have another rotation guy over 6’7”.
Shooters? We have to start this conversation with Max Klesmit. Coming into the year, the was a career 37.1% long range shooter on over four attempts per game. In the last two seasons, since transferring from Wofford, Klesmit has shot over 39% from long range, which includes a 5-for-10 last year at the Kohl Center against Marquette.
Through nine games this season, Klesmit has connected on a three-pointer twice in a game just three times. 6-for-11 vs Montana State, 2-for-6 vs Appalachian State, and 2-for-7 against UCF. He’s at a bit over 25% on the year, and if you drop those three games out of his numbers, Klesmit is shooting 6-for-39, which is 15.4%. I will let you decide whether this means “lost his touch” or “he’s due for a big game!”
After a 1-for-9 against Michigan, Klesmit leads Wisconsin in three-point attempts per game at 7.0. The only other guy north of four per game is John Tonje, and he’s hitting over 44% from deep this season. It’s definitely a career year for him so far, as the 6’5”, 218 pound Tonje shot 37% for four years at Colorado State and went 2-for-6 in injury-limited time at Missouri a year ago. But 37% is a for-real shooter number, so it will be up to Stevie Mitchell to figure out how to disrupt Tonje’s life for 40 minutes.
Marquette is also going to have to mind their knitting with John Blackwell. I said that Klesmit and Tonje are the only guys firing off more than four three-pointers per game, but if you drop that minimum to three per game, then we include Blackwell in the list. The 6’4” sophomore is hitting 34% of his attempts this season, which is well down from the 46% he hit a year ago. That may just be a by-product of being asked to shoot more as he’s gone from “18 minutes off the bench guy” to “30 minutes as a starter guy.” Still, pretty much every team in the country would be happy to have a third option behind the arc at 34%, so he’s definitely providing pop here.
Kamari McGee is having a nice season at 53% on 19 attempts, but he’s never been a notable shooter before this year. The aforementioned Nolan Winter is a threat, but not a serious one at 1.7 attempts per game. Freshman Jack Janicki is 5-for-14 on the year, but two of his makes came against Arizona and he’s 3-for-8 in limited minutes since.
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.
What To Watch For In EGG BOWL BEDLAM: Please stop letting John Tonje shoot free throws.
For the most part, John Tonje’s numbers for Wisconsin very much mimic the numbers he put up at Colorado State in his final year for Nico Medved and the Rams. 10.1 field goal attempts vs 11.7, 4.7 rebounds vs 5.1, 1.3 assists vs 1.8, etc., etc., etc., I can keep going with some tempo-free numbers to drive the point home, but you get it. He’s mostly speaking the same guy who was putting up 15/5/1 for a CSU team that went 6-12 in the Mountain West and beat just three KenPom.com top 100 teams all season.
The difference is the free throws. That’s how Tonje is getting from 14.6 points per game to 22.3. Yes, I’m sure shooting 44% on threes is helping. However, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that he’s gone from a career high 3.9 free throws per game to a whopping 8.8 a night. He was a very good free throw shooter for CSU, hitting 81% across four seasons. The bonus on the sudden jump in freebies is that Tonje is connecting on NINETY-FOUR PERCENT of his attempts from the stripe. He has missed just five times all season. Part of the reason he hung 41 on Arizona? An essentially perfect 21-for-22 from the free throw line against the Wildcats. Even with that on the scouting report, three teams since then have sent him to the line 10 times in a game.
Those free throws are what’s juicing his usage rate into a top 120 in the country number as his shot ratio is close enough to the same number as 2022-23 with Colorado State to barely count as a change. That’s why his efficiency is through the roof right now, because not only is he shooting with the clock stopped a whole bunch, but he’s making a metric ton of his attempts. The way the whistle has been going for Tonje this season has essentially meant that he’s wedging points into games where points don’t belong, and as a result, KenPom.com has him in the Player of the Year conversation right now. Six spots behind Kam Jones, mind you, but still in there.
[ASIDE: Also on that list is Iowa State’s Keshon Gilbert, St. John’s RJ Luis, Villanova’s Eric Dixon, and Purdue’s Trey Kaufman-Renn. One way or another, Marquette is going to determine who finishes second to Auburn’s Johni Broome in this race.]
I’m not really kidding about this free throw thing. Just don’t let Tonje shoot free throws, and that’s probably going to work out for you. Wisconsin has played three top 75 KenPom.com teams so far this season, all in the top 30 right now. I mentioned the Arizona shooting. Pitt let Tonje get to the line 10 times, and the Panthers lost by six, 81-75. Michigan put Tonje on the line just six times in 40 minutes earlier this week, and hey, look: Wolverines win by three.
It’s not just the free throws, by the way. It’s the fouls that you accrue that send Tonje to the line. Michigan’s three backcourt/wing starters finished Tuesday’s game with four combined fouls. Do you think that it might have been easier to defend Tonje late in the second half in the Kohl Center since the Wolverines weren’t worried about fouling out? Probably! Is that possibly a reason why Tonje didn’t attempt a single shot of any kind — no twos, no threes, no free throws — in the final 7:52 of that game? Certainly seems like that’s possible, right? In fact, Michigan completely removed him from the game even though he was on the floor the whole time. After he scored his final points of the game on a triple with 7:53 to go, he committed a foul at the 7:40 mark and came up with a steal at the 4:51 mark and that’s it.
I don’t know if Shaka Smart knows Dusty May well enough to get him on the phone, but I’ve definitely heard worse ideas for building a game plan. After all, Marquette needs to keep their guys on the floor as much as possible in this game. We know that Zaide Lowery is out for sure with a knee sprain, and Chase Ross is doubtful even though Smart is optimistic that he’ll play. You can play a basketball game with an eight man rotation, sure. But it gets real hard to pull that off when you’re trying to shut down a guy who’s elite at getting to the rim once those fouls start mounting and there’s only so many dudes you can put on the floor.
Am I making a big deal out of one particular aspect of Wisconsin’s team? Sure. I’m doing it because it’s the biggest change from last year’s team to this year’s team, and quite honestly, Tonje’s free throw shooting is about the only thing that’s different than any other Greg Gard coached team.
All-Time Series: Wisconsin leads, 71-59, and has all three games in the series since Shaka Smart took over at Marquette.