Wisconsin ended its season on a winning note with a 24-17 over Oklahoma State in the Guaranteed Bowl on Dec. 27. After a brief break, UW will kick up winter conditioning as it begins its early preparation for the 2023 campaign.

Over the next two weeks, BadgerBlitz.com will review each position before turning the page from the 2022 season. Today we'll examine the inside linebackers.

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When Jack Sanborn and Leo Chenal each called it a career after the 2021 season, Wisconsin was left with questions, but also youth and talent, at the inside linebacker position.

There were growing pains, but the play of Wisconsin's young inside linebackers in 2022 inspires plenty of reasons to be excited about the future of the position. One of the most hotly-contested position battles throughout fall camp leading up to the season appeared to bring out the best from Wisconsin's core of inexperienced but hungry linebackers.

The battle was won by Jordan Turner and Maema Njongmeta. They would be spelled at times by Jake Chaney, and to a lesser extent Tatum Grass, but Turner and Njongmeta should once again anchor the middle of the field for Wisconsin's defense in 2023.

Njongmeta had himself quite a season. Despite playing 76 less snaps than his fellow starter Turner, Njongmeta easily paced the team in tackles and threw in 3.5 sacks. He was a very sure tackler, logging the lowest missed tackle percentage of all inside linebackers on the Badgers, per Pro Football Focus. He flew around the field, racking up an impressive 47 stops, or tackles that are deemed failure for the offense.

Njongmeta wasn't asked to cover much, but when he was targeted, opposing players only caught 62.5% of their passes. Those are superb numbers for the first-year starter. With the stardom of Nick Herbig, the turnovers produced by John Torchio and the presence of Keeanu Benton, Njongmeta flew under the radar despite his excellent production. Now, the budding star is poised to be the face of the defense as a sideline-to-sideline thumper.

Turner had a solid first season as a starter as well, and if he can clean up some of his missed tackles, that duo has the potential to be truly elite in 2023. Chaney, who was only a sophomore, played more than the veteran Grass and showed promise as an instinctive player with great hit power. Again, it wasn't always perfect, but the acclimation year for these young linebackers has passed. The future looks very bright at inside linebacker for Wisconsin.

By no means are the inside linebackers a scapegoat for what happened on September 24th in Columbus. The entire roster was exposed. Nevertheless, their play left a lot to be desired.

It wasn't pretty. Missed tackles. Misalignments. For Wisconsin's young linebackers, as well as the rest of the defense, the bright lights of primetime and playing in front of 102,000 people was perhaps a little too much.

"I think we had some guys kinda get shellshocked early, and it took them a really long time to get out of it," Jim Leonhard said in the week after the blowout. "We had a little bit of guys seeing ghosts. Like, 'this happened and this happened.' Nope, that's not what it was."

Wisconsin's inside linebackers were an integral part of the pass rush in Leonhard's scheme. Against the Buckeyes, they managed just two pressures. CJ Stroud was free to sit back in the pocket and pick apart the Badgers' defense.

Ohio State also ran for a dominant 258 yards. Granted, that doesn't all fall on the inside linebackers, but they struggled to get off blocks and had little to no effect on the run game whatsoever.

Wisconsin and defense have nearly been synonymous over the past several decades. New defensive coordinator Mike Tressel knows that. He also knows his defense, a 3-3-5 scheme, was highly successful at Cincinnati and produced both on-field results and NFL level talent.

“The defense here (has) been able to recruit great players, has proven phenomenal in the Big Ten conference. We’re going to hold on to a lot of that, but we’re also going to bring some of that 3-3-5," Tressel said in his introductory press conference. "I think it’s a unique 3-3-5 that might give some different looks to people who haven’t prepared for it.”

By traditional definition, a 3-3-5 deploys three defensive linemen, three linebackers and five defensive backs. But Tressel's scheme sounds anything but traditional. With Wisconsin's talent at linebacker, both inside and outside, Tressel must find a way to get his best pass-rushers and inside backers on the field simultaneously. As the defensive coordinator as well as the inside linebackers coach, Tressel's fingerprints will be all over that position, especially.

Whatever that ends up looking like, Njongmeta and Turner will almost surely be the top two at the position still. It's simply a matter of where and how they play, which is still currently being concocted by Wisconsin's new defensive minds.

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