Coming into this season, most Wisconsin fans would have assumed that if a Badger was going to be in the running for the Butkus Award at this point in the year it would be T.J. Edwards, who was a finalist for the award in 2017 and who, throughout his career, has received far more hype than fellow senior inside linebacker Ryan Connelly.
While Edwards has now begun to turn it up a notch after a relatively slow start to the season, Connelly has been Wisconsin’s best defensive player so far, and it is he who was named a Butkus semifinalist on Monday.