Film Room: How Marvin Burks Jr. improves Wisconsin football's secondary
What Missouri transfer safety Marvin Burks Jr. brings to the Wisconsin Badgers defense.
In the Wisconsin football program’s most forgettable season in decades, its safety room was similarly uninspiring.
The Badgers lost Preston Zachman to a season-ending injury after just two games, and Austin Brown (40 tackles, three pass-breakups), Matt Jung (49 tackles), and the rest of the room were nothing to write home about.
Wisconsin returned Jung, Matthew Traynor, and a handful of younger developmental pieces for the 2026 season. However, it needed a steady, veteran presence to roam the back end of the defense — enter Marvin Burks Jr.
Burks joins the Badgers with 1,287 career snaps, according to PFF, and invaluable experience as a two-year starter in the SEC. It’s something of a foregone conclusion that he’s going to hold down a starting safety role.
So what does Burks bring to Wisconsin football? Below, BadgerNotes dives into the All-22 Film to investigate:
Eye-Discipline/Instincts
One of the first things you notice when watching Burks (#1) play is that he wastes very few steps. The safety trusts his eyes and instincts, and for good reason; they tend to be extremely sound.
Auburn tries a little misdirection handoff here, but Burks calmly reads the play and meets the halfback in the hole, where he’s already been wrapped up by a Missouri defender.
Burks doesn’t take a single step in the wrong direction, and again isn’t fooled by the quarterback Jackson Arnold’s fake speed option.
I never saw the safety get duped when opponents tried to run tricky misdirection plays and reverses. He wasn’t always the first man to the ball, given the nature of his position, but Burks consistently snuffed out plays adorned with eye-candy:
Above, Burks is the free safety in the back end of the defense. Mississippi State fakes the give to the halfback and instead goes with the wide receiver end-around. But Burks sniffs it out, takes a direct route to the ball-carrier, and delivers a hit to limit the Bulldogs to a gain of one or two yards.
The safety’s instincts also showed themselves on more standard plays, not just when the offense was trying to manipulate defenders’ eyes:
Above, Kansas shifts into a trips formation and tries to get a screen off quickly, hoping it’ll catch the Tigers’ defense out of position. Burks ensures that doesn’t happen.
Again: few (if any) wasted steps, a direct route to the ball-carrier, and clearly trusting what he’s seeing. These are the kinds of instincts refined by two years as a starter in the SEC.
