Greg Gard has been shouting about how the defense for the Badgers has been terrible, and when you look at the defensive metrics, he's not wrong. Wisconsin ranks among the bottom in all of college basketball in three of the most important defensive categories. He's got to find a way to get this group to play defense, or this will be a long season.
The Badgers are ranked in the 200s out of 365 teams in scoring defense, field goal percentage allowed, and 3-point percentage allowed. Greg Gard said before the season that he had goals for this team to be top-10 in defense. They aren't even top-200 right now.
Scoring Defense Rank: 231
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The Badgers' overall points allowed are 75.5 per game, which ranks 231st in the country. The Badgers have only held one team under 60 points, Ball State, and have allowed two different teams to score 90 or more on them (BYU and Nebraska). To put this in perspective, not one team in a win or a loss was able to score 90 or more on them last season until the NCAA tournament, when BYU scored 91.
Field Goal Percentage Allowed Rank: 224
This more showcases how they are allowing so many points. They currently allow opponents to shoot 44.4% from the field on them, which is good for 224th in the nation, which is not good. Their offense isn't making up the difference, as the Badgers are only shooting 44.3% on the season, good for 244th.
3-point Percentage Allowed Rank: 289
The stat the Badgers rank the lowest in is the percentage of 3-point shots made against them. That number sits at 35.3% which puts them almost to nearly 300th in the nation, which means that shooting threes against the Badgers right now is a recipe for success.
The interesting nugget here is that while with your eyes, it's easy to see that the big men are playing soft, and that usually feels like why the Badgers are losing games. The metric says it's actually because they aren't guarding the perimeter enough. It's a little bit of both, as they don't rank particularly well in any defensive category, but these three are the lowest by far.