Bronson Koenig talks about 2016 NCAA buzzer-beater for Badgers

The toughest year of Bronson Koenig’s career was coming to an end, and he was letting it all out in a St. Louis hotel.

The Wisconsin Badgers men’s basketball team had played Pittsburgh in the first round of the NCAA Tournament in 2016, but the 47-43 win was far from a masterpiece. Koenig had gone 1-for-8 and finished with two points. For the first time in a run of 44 straight games that dated to the previous year’s national runner-up team, he didn’t make a single three-pointer.

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“I played horrible,” Koenig said. “I was extremely stressed out. My mental health wasn’t very good. I had put so much pressure on myself to be kind of the representative of the Native basketball community for all Native people, obviously my family, the state of Wisconsin … I put so much pressure on myself to perform. I also didn’t know how to take care of myself. I didn’t have the tools to deal with the traumas and things that were going on that kind of went unchecked back then.”

The moment that would define his decorated Badgers career, a buzzer-beater to topple Xavier in the second round, was less than a day away, but he didn’t feel it then.

“It was one of those cries where you’re kind of hyperventilating, snot running down your nose, just completely overwhelmed,” he said. “As men, we hold so much in. It was just one of those times where I completely lost it and couldn’t stop crying and didn’t even want to play anymore, wanted to quit, because the pressure and everything else was just too heavy.”

It’s a story he’s told before, part of a circuit of speaking engagements to Native communities over the past decade. A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, Koenig, 31, has traveled to the far reaches of the country, even Alaska and Hawaii, to share stories from his career, run basketball camps and emphasize the importance of mental wellness.

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Naturally, even hundreds of miles from Wisconsin, someone will bring up the shot. Ten years later, it still appears in NCAA commercials and remains a…

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Publish date : 2026-03-17 10:03:00

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