Three Wisconsin Mr. Basketball winners (and two Wisconsin coaches) competing in Sweet 16 on Thursday

Marquette has to wait until Friday, but the NCAA Tournament resumes Thursday with four Sweet 16 battles, and the late games will feature a bevy of Wisconsin connections. Most notably, three former Mr. Basketball winners in Wisconsin will take the floor, and the sideline will also feature Wisconsin natives in Alabama coach Nate Oats and Iowa State coach T.J. Otzelberger.

Iowa State's Milan Momcilovic (Pewaukee, 2023), North Carolina's Seth Trimble (Menomonee Falls, 2022) and Illinois' Marcus Domask (Waupun, 2019) will be playing Thursday, and all three are likely to make an impact.

All the Wisconsin connections are crammed into Thursday's late games

Oats will lead his fourth-seeded Crimson Tide against top-seeded North Carolina with a projected 8:39 p.m. CT tip from the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. UNC, by the way, has Trimble coming off the bench.

At TD Garden in Boston with an approximate tip off of 9:09 p.m., Otzelberger, Momcilovic and second-seeded Iowa State will square off against third-seeded Illinois.

Iowa State coach T.J. Otzelberger's tight shirts are about 'unity'

Otzelberger, who attended high school at St. Thomas More and has previously been head basketball coach at Burlington Catholic Central High School before beginning a college coaching career, has been known to wear tight-fitting polo shirts. There's apparently a reason for that.

Paul Myerberg of USA TODAY asked the 46-year-old Otzelberger about the fashion motif.

"Not a small and not a medium, Otzelberger’s collared shirts seem to exist in the purgatory between these two sizes, known as shmedium," Myerberg wrote. "The cut will cling to his upper body and inch up his arms, revealing impressively defined forearms, biceps and triceps while leaving a whisper of space between his chin and an open top button."

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"Our team and our coaching staff is in unity," Otzelberger said. "And one way that we can show that is through how we dress, what we wear and that we’re all on the same page and we’re all connected. For us, we’ve taken a lot of pride in everybody doing that."

Assistant coach J.R. Blount, a two-time state champion player at Dominican High School in Whitefish Bay, is also in his third season with the program. Fellow assistant Kyle Green was formerly head coach at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and Nate Schmidt was once video coordinator for the Wisconsin Herd in Oshkosh. And those Wisconsin connections have certainly come through.

For a program that had already attracted NBA star Tyrese Haliburton (Oshkosh North), Terrence Lewis (Milwaukee Riverside), Nate Jenkins (Kettle Moraine) and Nate Schuster (Menomonee Falls) in recent years, the arrival of Otzelberger also brought in new Wisconsin alumni like Tyrese Hunter (Racine St. Catherine, since transferred to Texas), Jackson Paveletzke (Kimberly, a transfer from Wofford) and Momcilovic, a three-time state champion at Pewaukee High School.

Though his Pewaukee predecessor, Jack Gohlke of Oakland, has been one of the stories of March Madness, Momcilovic has had a good NCAA Tournament. He scored 10 points on 4-of-9 shooting against Washington State in the second round after a team-leading 19-point performance against South Dakota State in the opening round, with five rebounds and two assists.

Waupun's Marcus Domask will look to continue sensational tournament

Standing in the Cyclones' way of their first regional final since 2000 is Illinois, a Big Ten squad that defeated Wisconsin for the league tournament championship.

Marcus Domask has been a revelation for the Illini this year. The Waupun native, winner of the 2019 Mr. Basketball in Wisconsin, spent four years at Southern Illinois but has made the most of his one season in Illinois. He finished with 12 points, 11 rebounds and 10 assists in the tournament opener against Morehead State, officially the ninth triple-double in NCAA Tournament history and first since Ja Morant against Marquette in 2019.

Domask finished with 22 points, seven rebounds and three assists in an 89-63 win over Duquesne in the second round, shooting 9-of-16 from the field. And that was coming off a 26-point, seven-rebound, eight-assist performance against Wisconsin.

Over his last nine games, Domask has scored 18.6 points per game with 5.9 rebounds and 5.8 assists on 47% shooting from the field and 41% from three-point range. Illinois has lost just one of those games, a setback against top-seeded Purdue.

Watertown's Nate Oats just keeps ascending in NCAA basketball

It wasn't so long ago that Oats — who began his coaching career as an assistant at Maranatha Baptist College in Watertown before becoming an assistant at UW-Whitewater — was coaching Buffalo, which reached the second round of the NCAA Tournament in back-to-back seasons and made the national rankings.

But Oats left the Mid-American Conference school for Alabama in March 2019, and things haven't slowed down. The Crimson Tide got the No. 1 ranking in the country heading into the tournament last year, when the school fell in the Sweet 16. Oats has led the program to four straight tournaments (including three top-four seeds) after the program appeared just twice in the previous 13 years.

Like Otzelberger, Oats coached in high school, spending more than a decade at Romulus High School in Detroit before he became an assistant at Buffalo from 2013 to 2015. He inherited the head coaching job in 2015.

Earlier this month, Oats received a six-year contract extension.

North Carolina second-year player Seth Trimble followed his brother to Chapel Hill

Trimble and his Tar Heels stand in the way of Oats and Alabama.

The 6-3 sophomore native of Menomonee Falls showed he has serious hops, with two blocks in the second round of what became a lopsided win over Michigan State. Trimble doesn't start for coach Hubert Davis, but he does average 17.3 minutes per game this year and 5.1 points in 34 contests, plus 2.2 rebounds.

Trimble's older brother, J.P. Tokoto, also suited up for North Carolina, playing from 2012 to 2015. Tokoto's career ended at the hands of the Wisconsin Badgers in the Sweet 16 in 2015, with UW en route to the NCAA title game. That UNC loss also occurred at Crypto.com Arena, then known as the Staples Center.