That’s What They Said, Part 2: Things People Should Not Have Said About Joey Hauser Committing To Marquette

On Sunday, Class of 2018 top 50 prospect Joey Hauser announced his verbal commitment to attend Marquette University and play for head coach Steve Wojciechowski and the Marquette Golden Eagles. While it’s a decision that Hauser, the younger brother of current Golden Eagle Sam Hauser, had to make on his own time, it’s also one that a lot of people saw coming a long time ago.

The first two 247 Crystal Ball predictions for Hauser went up on July 2nd and July 3rd of 2015, more than two years ago. Not coincidentally, those came from Mark Miller, the editor of Wisconsin Basketball Yearbook, and Jerry Meyer, 247’s Director of Basketball Scouting. Also not coincidentally, those predictions came six weeks after Sam Hauser made his verbal commitment to Marquette. Another MU prediction followed in November, and then things went quiet for a while. Two more predictions for Marquette popped up in late January of this year, bringing the total to five straight for the Golden Eagles before Hauser’s junior year of high school was even finished.

Now, of course, the Crystal Ball has significant flaws in it as far as an actual resource as to which way a recruit is truly leaning, but the general theory of “Joey Hauser is going to go to Marquette” has been a long standing opinion held by a lot of people for a long time. That’s the point I want to drive home here.

The reason why is because Wisconsin Badgers fans got VERY VERY VERY mad on Sunday evening when Hauser announced his decision. I suspect this has to do with things buzzing around that head coach Greg Gard had made Hauser his only recruit for the Class of 2018, but let’s face it: that’s either a lie or a stupidly made up rumor.

Anyway, it appears that Badgers fans took that as VERY SERIOUS INFORMATION and thus, because Bucky is all-powerful in the state or something, obviously Hauser would be won over by the attention from Gard and his staff. I guess. I don’t know, I’m trying to attach logic to these people, and well, hey: when you’re shouting at a 17 year old kid on Twitter, you passed the point of no return on logic a long time ago.

Here’s what I mean. These are all actual tweets sent as replies to Joey Hauser’s announcement of his commitment.

I’m not sure what Austin’s point was here, given that the Badgers went more than 50 years without a conference championship and Marquette didn’t join a conference until the 1989-90 season, but okay? Also, y’know, the part where conference championships are a largely useless indication of the long term quality of a program, but that’s not the point here.

Over the last 10 seasons — aka “since Joey Hauser was aware that basketball existed” — Marquette is 5-5 against Wisconsin. What an amazingly stupid thing to say.

This tweet was apparently sent by someone who was only alive during the 2014-15 season, the worst Marquette season in 30 years. This dude ended up doubling down on his dumb in a conversation that stemmed from this.

How surprising, a Badger fan unable to comprehend anything before Bo Ryan was hired. Lemme tell you about Maurice Lucas, the guy that no less a basketball icon than Bill Walton called the best teammate he ever had.....

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this one. It is a reply to the “poor choice” tweet above, for the record. It’s also a reply to a RT from Boiled Sports, which is a Purdue site, and Dubby here might be a Boilermakers fan.

I presume this one was a joke on some level. Either that or this dude needs to have his gas lines checked for leaks. I get being a homer for your team, but c’mon, man.

The literal universal reaction from college hoops reporters to Hauser’s commitment was “Steve Wojciechowski has things cooking in Milwaukee” or some variant of that. It takes a special skill to bury your head in the sand like this.

This is a reply to the previous one. We probably shouldn’t mention that Wisconsin wasn’t even good enough to make the NIT between 1947 and 1988, but oops, I just did it anyway.

Well, at least Adam here is actually a student at Wisconsin-Madison. Just out of curiosity, what’s the plan for the years when Marquette wins, which is roughly every other year over the past decade? Crying out loud, or......?

This one’s actually relatively sedate, I suppose. I mean, I think it’s weird to expect that Wisconsin is going to continue on this Sweet 16 appearances streak that they’re on now that this past year’s seniors are gone, but, y’know, do you.

A brief palate cleanser as an example of the many replies from self-identified Badger fans to Hauser that are actually positive.

Gonna pair these next two together.....

What’s with telling 17 year olds that they’re going to regret their college choice? And to Liz’s point, from where I’m sitting, Joey had one option that could even be considered to be “better.” Shoutout to Tom Izzo.

Marquette’s top recruit according to 247 for the past 9 years, starting with the 2017 class in reverse order: 133, 71, 9, 76, 33, 99, 67, 28, 63. Between 2013 and 2016, one of the top two prospects in the state of Wisconsin picked Marquette, and Joey Hauser makes it five out of the last six years.

My dude here apparently just woke up out of a decade long coma on Saturday night.

I’m not telling you to click through on Doris’ profile here but I am telling you that this is someone’s grandmother yelling at a 17 year old kid on the internet.

What a weird comment from a guy who thinks the Badgers are a very dumb team.

This one is my favorite. Our man Nate here is so bad at the Twitters that he doesn’t understand that he is actually replying directly to Joey Hauser and instead, refers to him in the third person.

You’ll notice that absolutely none of these are coming from either Michigan State fans or Notre Dame fans, both of whom would have had an interest in Joey Hauser’s decision. Both of those fanbases reacted to this by collectively saying “eh, well, whatcha gonna do.” There’s also nothing from Kansas fans, even though it was reported that Hauser was beginning to draw attention from the Jayhawks shortly before his commitment. You’d almost expect a certain amount of “DUDE YOU DIDN’T EVEN LISTEN TO WHAT COACH SELF HAD TO SAY” from KU fans, and that kind of reaction would be pretty fair, to be honest. Didn’t happen though, because Kansas fans have solid self-esteems unlike some people.

And now, on to replies to Jeff Potrykus, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel beat reporter for all things Wisconsin Badgers. In other words: Things people wanted to say to Joey but were actually too scared to post directly to him. We start out with a familiar face.....

Note the time stamp! He was so proud of his comment to Potrykus that he then sent it directly to Joey! Points for bravery! Stupid internet bravery, but y’know, small victories.

I presume that Bob here is referring to the fact that Marquette “only” recruited Wally Ellenson in order to get Henry Ellenson to attend Marquette, and is thus “accusing” Wojo of doing the same thing with Sam Hauser to convince Joey Hauser to come to Milwaukee. That must be why Sam led Marquette in minutes played last year.........

I presume Mike just discovered that Wisconsin was attempting to recruit Joey at some point in the last month. If you’ve been paying attention for the last two years, the younger Hauser is anything but an “interesting” choice.

Hey, it’s this guy! If you compare time stamps from the top of the page, he went out of his way to come back 45 minutes after yelling at Joey to make sure that Potrykus knew about his very important opinion.

We already covered the NIT thing earlier. I presume that Randy is also not very good at the Twitters given his “sentence” construction here and his understanding of how Twitter works as I think he thinks he’s talking directly to Joey.

You would also think that you would stop for three seconds and realize the entire timeline of Luke Fischer’s college career (went to Indiana, left after a semester, shifted to Marquette, Buzz Williams quit his job, talent pool bottomed out as a result of Williams’ recruiting failures/the coaching change) before you go and make ridiculous statements like this. Also: I’d be fascinated to see this dude attempt to name one other guy in his “et al” here.

I’m not even bothering to try and track down tweets just sent to the universe in general that mentioned Joey Hauser or Marquette here, or insane Facebook comments on various pages (although I’m sure those are even more insane) but I will close on this one just because I thought that the timing of it was hilarious.