Key Wisconsin Badgers: No. 12 - Inside linebacker Jordan Turner

Wisconsin's 2023 football season is right around the corner, so BadgerBlitz.com ranked the top 30 players who we think will be the keys to success for Luke Fickell's squad this year.

Playing time, past performance and positional depth all factored in to our staff rankings.

Jordan Turner narrowed his list of 40-plus schools to just five in June of 2019.

In the end, it was a head-to-head Big Ten battle for the three-star linebacker. And the college degrees on the walls of the Turner household made things a bit more interesting for the family.

"His mom went to Wisconsin and his dad went to Purdue," Farmington (MI) head coach Kory Cioroch told BadgerBlitz.com. "Those were the two major schools that were in the mix in the end.

"Wisconsin just felt like home and he loved Madison. He said he can picture himself there for four or five years. He felt a very strong relationship with both coaching staffs at Purdue and Wisconsin. But with Wisconsin, he enjoyed the visit, enjoyed the campus and enjoyed all the people there."

Turner was part of an inside linebacker class for the Badgers in 2020 that also included Malik Reed.

Turner, who won a role with the No. 1 defense during fall camp last year, started 12 games for Wisconsin and become a mainstay in the middle of the defense. The 6-foot-1, 225-pound linebacker capitalized on the potential he showed in 2021. In those 24 snaps, Turner accumulated a pressure and a pair of interceptions.

Turner is consistently around the ball and had several practices during the spring where he totaled multiple hurries and was disruptive in the run game. Those practices built on a 2022 season where Turner was fourth on the team with 23 pressures, two of which turned into sacks. The fourth-year player took home defensive player of the game honors in the Guaranteed Rate Bowl with eight tackles, 1.5 tackles for loss and a quarterback hit.

Manning the middle of the defense, Turner will have to improve on being a more sure tackler after he missed 13 this past season. Many of his worst performances came early in the year, including a season-low grade of 40.7 on the road at Ohio State, according to Pro Football Focus.

Earlier this month, Turner was suspended from the Wisconsin football team after he violated the UW Department of Athletics’ Student-Athlete Discipline Policy. In a release on social media, Turner said he "was cited with an OWI first offense along with additional traffic violations." He was since been reinstated by head coach Luke Fickell.

New coordinator Mike Tressel and the defense have the task of making up for the production lost with the departures of John Torchio, Nick Herbig and Keeanu Benton, who led the team in game-changing plays with a combined 18 sacks and five interceptions. The next players up to lead the defense with splash plays could come at inside linebacker with Turner and Maema Njongmeta in the middle. Tressel likes the depth in his room and often had defensive personnel on the field in the spring that included three inside linebackers with constant movement from the group.

Filling in for Jack Sanborn and Leo Chenal, who started the previous two seasons at inside linebacker for Wisconsin, Turner and Njongmeta progressed throughout their first seasons as starters in 2022. Now the two could be well on their way to breakout seasons in the fall after being named third-team All-Big Ten and an honorable mention All-Big Ten, respectively.

“We're more experienced," Turner said in the spring. "Me and Maema, we had our first starting snaps last year, so just getting adjusted to all of that and a lot of stuff happened last year. We learned from our mistakes last year and now we're more mature individually, and as a defense we're matured. Now we're more experienced and more prepared to not let the things that happened last year come back and haunt us."

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