MILWAUKEE -- This year's I-94 rivalry game wasn't supposed to be close.
Wisconsin was too experienced, too big and too talented for an undersized and unproven Marquette team.
And that may still remain true, but Marquette was able to ugly it up enough to hang around No. 2 Wisconsin for the better part of Saturday afternoon. In the end, the Badgers did just enough to grind out a 49-38 in front of a near-sellout crowd of 18,573 at the BMO Harris Bradley Center.
"I thought it was a hard-fought game," Marquette coach Steve Wojciechowski said. "I thought it was a defensive battle. It certainly wasn't a thing of beauty on either end offensively.
"I think you need to credit the defense of both teams. I thought we played really good defense on them, and they certainly played good defense on us. We have to continue to get better offensively, in terms of our execution, so we can score on an outstanding defensive team like Wisconsin."
Marquette (4-4) tried to overcome Wisconsin's height advantage by packing in its zone defense. The Golden Eagles weren't going to allow the Badgers to just throw the ball into Frank Kaminsky and Nigel Hayes, instead opting to let Wisconsin fire from the outside.
The same zone defense that helped Marquette to wins over Georgia Tech and Tennessee in the Orlando Classic allowed the Golden Eagles to stick around Saturday despite a horrendous offensive performance.
"Our zone has been a good defense for us," Wojciechowski said. "It has been disruptive. I think we have pretty good quickness as a team. I thought we were able to make them uncomfortable offensively. They score the vast majority of their points in the paint or at the free-throw line. We wanted to protect our paint, and we wanted to play without fouling to make them shoot contested jump shots."
Wisconsin (8-1) only hit eight of its 30 attempts from beyond the arc Saturday, but each make came at an important point of the game.
After Marquette opened the second half on a 7-0 run to cut Wisconsin's lead to 25-22, Wisconsin senior guard Josh Gasser drilled a triple to begin a 7-1 run by the Badgers. Gasser answered again with a 3-pointer when a pair of free throws from Sandy Cohen III pulled Marquette to within 35-33 with 8:16 to play.
The Golden Eagles made one last charge to cut the deficit to 44-38, but Kaminsky delivered the knockout blow by connecting on a 3-pointer with 48 seconds left.
"They packed that zone in pretty tight, tried to keep the ball out of Frank's hands, and Nigel in there too, which is a pretty smart decision I think," Gasser said. "We were forced to take a lot of outside jumpers, and they weren't going for the majority of the game, but we happened to make enough to win."
While Marquette forced Wisconsin to change its style of play offensively, the Golden Eagles couldn't get anything going when they had the ball. Instead of using dribble penetration to kick out to shooters, Marquette frequently drove right into Kaminsky and Hayes, who either blocked the shot or forced a contested attempt.
The Golden Eagles finished 13 of 45 (28.9 percent) from the field, with six of their made field goals coming from beyond the arc.
Marquette also turned the ball over 10 times, as Wisconsin scored nearly a third of its points off miscues by the Golden Eagles.
"Turnovers really cost us," senior guard Matt Carlino, who scored 18 of Marquette's 38 points, said. "I think their defense had a lot to do with not being able to reverse the ball. They were waiting for passes out. That had to have been part of their game plan. That was them and they did a good job with that."
Marquette was done in by two scoring droughts of over six minutes. The first one came in early in the first half when the Golden Eagles missed 10 consecutive shots and didn't score for seven minutes, 11 seconds before Carlino hit a 3-pointer to cut Wisconsin's lead to 17-10 with 8:05 left in the half.
After Cohen pulled Marquette to within two with 8:57 to play, the Golden Eagles didn't score for six minutes, 27 seconds. Carlino again snapped the scoreless spell with a 3-pointer, but it only cut Wisconsin's lead to 44-36 with 2:30 remaining.
"Our offense let us down," Wojciechowski said. "We're not a juggernaut offensively by any stretch. We have one established college scorer in Matt Carlino. The rest of the guys are trying to find their offensive identity. The thing we can't do, and what I thought hurt us the most, were poor decisions. Poor decisions that led to some really tough shots when we should have kicked or made one more pass, or turnovers.
"We haven't played a team as good defensively as Wisconsin is. They are huge. When you get in the paint and you have Kaminsky, Hayes, Dekker -- those guys are big guys. We haven't had to finish at the rim or make decisions in the paint against a team of their size."
While they came up short in the end, the Golden Eagles held true to the identity of being a hard-working, scrappy team they began displaying in the Orlando Classic.
Marquette is a better team now than it was two weeks ago, but its young roster still has a long ways to go. Three of the Golden Eagles' four losses have come to ranked teams from the Big Ten, all of them by exactly 11 points.
The Golden Eagles are currently capable of competing but not yet able to take down one of the big boys in college basketball.
"We want to be fighters," Wojciechowski said. "We want to be guys who compete and have great competitive spirit. I think our guys have had that. If we can couple that with better decision making, we have a chance."
Offensive nightmare: How badly did Marquette struggle offensively against Wisconsin?
The Golden Eagles' 38 points were the fewest by any team in the Marquette-Wisconsin rivalry game since Marquette scored 34 against the Badgers in 1948. It was Marquette's lowest scoring output since it was held to 35 points in a loss to Ohio State on Nov. 16, 2013.
Marquette's 28.9 field-goal percentage was its lowest since shooting 18.9 percent against Ohio State in 2013. Wisconsin shot 32.7 percent Saturday, the lowest field-goal percentage to beat Marquette since Villanova shot 31.8 percent in a victory over the Golden Eagles on Feb. 4, 2006.
Fischer set to return: Marquette doesn't play again until Dec. 16 when it hosts Arizona State, the first game 6-foot-11 sophomore center Luke Fischer will be eligible to play for the Golden Eagles.
Fischer has sat out since transferring from Indiana last January. The Germantown (Wis.) High School product played 13 games for the Hoosiers last season, including scoring 10 points in 19 minutes against Kennesaw State on Dec. 22. He's expected to make an immediate impact since he's the only true center on Marquette's roster.
"Luke will really help us on both ends of the floor," Wojciechowski said. "He has legit size. He's a smart player. He's a skilled player. I think he will really help us.
"I'm really happy for him. As hard as it is for me to not be able to put him in the game, there's nobody that it is harder on than Luke. He's a competitor. I'm really happy for him that he'll get to finally suit up and compete for us."
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