As you’re reading this, it’s Thursday morning, December 11th, 2025. This week is Finals Week at Marquette University, and with Wednesday’s exams in the books, we’re officially past the halfway point. If you’re familiar with the traffic around campus at the end of fall semester, you know that today is the first big day of students packing up and exiting the residence halls until spring semester starts.
It’s this departure from and return to campus that I want to talk about for a moment today.
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Let’s rewind a little bit, back to December 2nd. That was the day that Marquette men’s basketball hosted Valparaiso at Fiserv Forum. This is what the west student section looked like as starting lineups were being introduced before the game. You can see Nigel James’ name in the ribbon board above the seats.
I don’t have a picture of the east student section because my vantage point in Section 119 kind of makes it hard to get the point across, so trust me when I tell you that it basically looked the same.
First Things First: This game happened on the Tuesday night of the last week of classes for fall semester. I do not begrudge a single student who said “hey, I can traipse down to Fiserv for this game OR I can spend those three hours working on [insert schoolwork here] so I don’t have to worry about it later this week or this weekend or next week.” Between this being the first home game since the struggle against Central Michigan and in the wake of the blown double digit leads in the Oklahoma game down in Chicago, I completely understand why roughly two-thirds of the student season ticket holders said “I have better ways to spend my time right this second.”
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And that’s the problem, right?
See, that’s the last time that Marquette is going to play a home game with the residence halls open until the January 10th home game against Villanova. The halls will open at 8am that day before a 1:30pm tipoff against the Wildcats. Marquette won’t play a home game with everyone back on campus — hey, we get it, the first five hours that the dorms are open isn’t the most convenient time to move back in! — until January 19th, when Providence comes to Milwaukee.
Between right now and that Nova game? Marquette will play six games, one against Purdue and then the first five games of the Big East schedule.
Between right now and that Providence game? Nine games, the previously mentioned six plus Nova plus two road games.
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Counting the Providence game, there are just five home games with classes fully in session left on the schedule. There is a sixth game after that, but the regular season finale is set for the first day of Spring Break and I’m guessing a lot of people will already be out of the res halls before that game against UConn tips off at 11:30am.
Marquette is 5-5 right now without a single win against a team in the top 220 of the NET. You can say the top 190 of the KenPom rankings if you want, but the point is about the same. Marquette is not favored on the road against #6 Purdue this Saturday. What do you think Marquette’s record is going to be going into that Villanova game? What about into that Providence game?
What is the student section attendance going to look like if the team does not give the student ticket holders a reason to show up and cheer between now and mid-January?
It’s one thing for about 2,000 Marquette students to say “Hey, the team’s not great, it’s Valpo, I have this paper due by Friday, I have my organic chemistry final on Monday, I need to spend this time studying.”
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It’s another thing for the students to start saying “I can’t even muster up the energy to have fun on National Marquette Day,” or “I’m not in a hurry to see this team against a top 25 ranked St. John’s team.”
That’s what’s going to happen unless a lot of things start changing very quickly for Shaka Smart and his basketball team. They can stop that from happening. They can be the domino, to use Smart’s language, to tip over the domino of getting the energy into the student section.
3-3 over the next six going into Villanova? 5-4 going into Providence? That might be enough to charge things up a bit and keep student attendance at a reasonable level.
2-7? Might be a little bit sparse in the Fiserv Forum end zones.
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