BADGER HATE WEEK: Women's Basketball Gets Into The Action

It's apparently an official tradition for Double Badger Hate Week to be a regular occurrence now.  The last two seasons Marquette and Wisconsin's women's basketball teams have squared off on the same day as the men's hoops teams, just in the opposite location.  Wisconsin has taken the advantage in both of those games, and looking back at it, that's kind of a bummer.  Over the last two years, the Badgers are 20-38 against teams that aren't Marquette.  I don't want to point to specific games to explain why Terri Mitchell was let go after last season, but not being able to find a way to beat a slipshod Badgers team has to be on the list of reasons.

Marquette comes in to this game with a record of 2-5.  This year's squad finds itself struggling a bit due to a number of different issues.  First, there's the obvious adjustments for the returning players to new head coach Carolyn Kieger and her staff.  Then there's integrating three freshman guards and a little used sophomore guard into a roster that desperately needs said guards to play major minutes due to the composition of the roster.  These issues are then compounded by Marquette's struggles to shoot the ball, both inside (42.6%) and outside (28.1%) the arc, and then that's made even worse by the team averaging 23.3 turnovers per game.  Of course, the Golden Eagles could mitigate those turnover problems by forcing a few of their own, but they average nine more turnovers committed than turnovers forced.

Game #8: vs Wisconsin (1-5)

When: Saturday, December 6, 2014, at 1pm Central
Where: Kohl Center in Madison, WI
Audio/Visual: There's video if you have a BTN2Go account.  You can try to listen to the game on 92.1 FM from Madison via IHeartRadio, or keep track via live stats.
Twitter Updates: @MarquetteWBB

So, as not great as Wisconsin has been over the past two seasons, they've been even more not great this season.  Following last night's 66-54 loss at Miami (FL), where the Badgers never led or even had the game tied with points on the board, they find themselves at 1-5 on the season.  The lone win was a 71-60 affair against Illinois State in the Kohl Center, and if you read the recap of MU's volleyball loss in the NCAA tournament, you know that talking about Illinois State playing on Wisconsin's campus is giving me anxiety attacks.

That win came in their opener, so they've lost five straight.  After tomorrow's contest, the Badgers have two road games scheduled: At Florida and at UW-Green Bay.  If they don't figure out a way to solve the Golden Eagles, they are going to be staring at the possibility of needing to beat Oral Roberts in their last non-conference game in order to get a second win before Big Ten play starts.

Junior Nicole Bauman and redshirt senior Michala Johnson are leading the Badgers' offense, with both women averaging 12.8 points per game.  Johnson controls the glass for Wisconsin, with 6.3 rebounds per game.  Junior and native of Canada Dakota Whyte runs the show on offense, dishing out 3.5 assists on average.