I started off Sunday afternoon’s Marquette men’s basketball game on the road against UConn waiting for the other shoe to drop. It looked like the first one fell as the Huskies popped off a 10-2 run in the middle-ish of the first half to go up 20-10, their first double digit lead of the game.
And then….. UConn really couldn’t get much further than that. They got it to 11, and then 12, and then Marquette had a 9-2 run. A bucket from Josh Clark made it 34-29 with 1:51 left in the opening 20 minutes, and for a second, it looked like Marquette’s game plan might just be coming together.
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And then UConn scored the next seven points bridging halftime, and an 8-0 run made it 52-33 with 13:28 left to play.
Yeah, okay, there’s the shoe. 15-4 Huskies coming out of the locker room, and that was pretty much that. Marquette didn’t get closer than 15 the rest of the way, UConn’s lead maxed out at 23 a couple of times, and a 13-5 MU burst in the final four minutes shined this thing up a little bit more than it really deserved for a 16 point margin at the final horn.
Honestly, I thought it was going to go a lot worse than that. It’s not really UConn coach Dan Hurley taking his foot off the gas to not run it up all that much, because I’m pretty sure he let his team have it in the locker room at halftime after MU slashed their way back into the game late in the opening stanza. This was Marquette suckerpunching a team with national championship potential and that team saying “hey, wait, we’re the home team here, we’re the better team, let’s wrap this up early,” and they did.
If you’re trying to take anything important about Marquette away from this game, don’t. They lost by double digits and were down 21 with 1:10 to play. This wasn’t a good performance, this wasn’t a “ah, well, they fought” performance. It merely didn’t go as poorly as it could have or perhaps even as poorly as some of us (me!) thought it would.
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I’m going to say this statement of fact and then get out of here: After not playing at all in the second half against Seton Hall, Caedin Hamilton started this game, committed two fouls 19 seconds apart just over two minutes in, got sent to the bench, and didn’t return until the start of the second half. He turned the ball over after a rebound 41 seconds in, committed a foul seven seconds later, got sent to the bench, came back with 8:25 left, and committed a foul less than a minute later. In Marquette’s last two games, he has played 13 minutes and committed seven fouls. That is a Fouls Per 40 Minutes of 21.5.
Highlights, such as they are, courtesy of GoMarquette.com and NBC Sports:
Up Next: Buddy, I don’t know how to tell you this, but next time out is a must win game for Marquette. The Golden Eagles have now lost six straight and each of their first four Big East games. Xavier comes to Milwaukee on Wednesday night for a 6pm tipoff on FS1. The Musketeers just lost, 86-77, to DePaul on Saturday. Xavier is 1-3 in Big East play after squeaking out a road win at Georgetown that got Ed Cooley suspended for a game. If Marquette can not figure out how to get past the Musketeers, I don’t know when they’re going to win again.
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