The year is 2025. All of your friends are talking about how NIL and transfers are ruining college sports. They don’t know the players on their team, it feels like free agency every year, there are apparently no rules, and even the reasonable souls that agree that players should get paid think that things have gone off the rails somewhere. What happened to the good old days when it was just Duke and UK so obviously cheating?
But there is a glimmer of hope way up north in Wisconsin. In Milwaukee, Coach Shaka Smart, once a darling for bucking every trend with VCU, is doing it again. His Marquette Golden Eagles have brought back more players than most everyone else excluding the military academies and the Ivy League (and the brothers in the MAC, John Groce and Travis Steele). Here then, is our hero for these times. Here is the leader that will make sense of all of this.
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Here is Marquette: 5-10 overall, 0-4 in the Big East, mired in a slump worse than the one that cost Steve Wojciechowski his job. The Golden Eagles have dismissed starter Zaide Lowery from the team for definitely not fighting an assistant coach. They started the season 47th in the KenPom and projected as a tournament contender. They are now 118th and aren’t even on the Crown bubble. They were projected fifth in the Big East, they are dead last and winless. This is a program in deep trouble.
And yet, they remain dangerous. They took Dayton to overtime, they lost by one to Oklahoma, they played Seton Hall incredibly close, and they did better away to UConn than Xavier did at home. They’re down, they may well be out, they aren’t a buy game.
Team Fingerprint
On offense Marquette is so bad they make DePaul look good. Of the 365 teams to hoist a shot in D1 basketball this year, Marquette ranks 311th in effective field goal percentage. They are 309th from three, 291st inside the arc. They shoot better from the line, but only a below average 70.2%. The problem with all this, of course, is that Xavier’s defense made DePaul look like the Splash Brothers the last time out. Marquette plays fast and badly on offense. It remains to be seen if that matters.
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The defense is a little better. 95th overall, they force turnovers at a decent margin and come up with a lot of steals. They tend to make offenses work a long time to get a shot, but they tend to allow pretty decent looks and are very highly susceptible to quick ball movement. Despite having two dudes that are near as makes no difference seven feet tall, they don’t block many shots.
Players
|
|
Starting matchups |
|
|---|---|---|
|
Nigel James Jr. |
Point Guard |
Roddie Anderson III |
|
Freshman |
Class |
Senior |
|
6’0″, 190 |
Measurements |
6’3″, 195 |
|
12.6/2.8/3.7 |
Game line |
13/2.9/2.6 |
|
42.4/32.5/71.2 |
Shooting line |
38.7/30/75.9 |
|
|
James is a top-100 recruit who has started his career fairly well considering the circumstances. He’s the only Golden Eagle who has been in double figures in every Big East game so far and his scoring efficiency hasn’t been bad at all. His distribution is what has been dragging down his overall efficiency, with his A:TO in conference play sitting at 16:13 so far. I would tend to look at it as a case of him being a freshman on a team with precious few scoring options who has been asked to do too much rather than him being the cause of the problems. His jumper has been pretty bad though, and he’s shooting 31% away from the rim. |
|
|
Adrien Stevens |
Shooting Guard |
Malik Messina-Moore |
|
Freshman |
Class |
Senior |
|
6’4″, 215 |
Measurements |
6’5″, 200 |
|
5.6/2.2/1.1 |
Game line |
8.9/2.7/3.8 |
|
42.9/36/75 |
Shooting line |
35.6/28.3/76.2 |
|
|
Speaking of freshmen who are in a bigger role than anticipated, Stevens landed fairly close to where James did in most rankings and was noted for his size and ability to get to the rim and finish. It is notable, then, that he has been deployed as a catch and shoot guy with an incredibly low usage rate (9.4% in conference play). Stevens’ insertion into the starting lineup coincided with Zaide Lowery’s exit from it and, while his first start saw him produce 15 points against Wisconsin, his lack of scoring production coupled with an inability to affect the game notably on the glass or defense have compounded this team’s problems rather than solve them. |
|
|
Chase Ross |
Small Forward |
Tre Carroll |
|
Senior |
Class |
Senior |
|
6’5″, 210 |
Measurements |
6’8″, 235 |
|
16.3/3.9/3.2 |
Game line |
16.1/5.6/3 |
|
41/26.9/76.8 |
Shooting line |
47/34.3/59.3 |
|
|
Ross was supposed to be the guy to take the big jump this year and keep Marquette battling at the top of the league like 4 year Golden Eagles in the same way that Oso Ighodaro and Kam Jones had done before him. The results have been fairly mixed so far, with his 31 point turn against Maryland nearly rescuing what would have been the only high major win of the noncon slate. His production and efficiency has plummeted since Lowery left the lineup, and he’s averaging 10.1 points on a .282/.167/.680 in those 6 games. |
|
|
Royce Parham |
Power Forward |
Filip Borovicanin |
|
Sophomore |
Class |
Senior |
|
6’8″, 230 |
Measurements |
6’9″, 227 |
|
9.3/4.7/0.8 |
Game line |
9.2/7.9/4.2 |
|
42.5/30.8/60 |
Shooting line |
47.1/30.4/90.9 |
|
|
Parham came into the season as the backup big, but has leapfrogged Ben Gold in the pecking order and placed himself in the starting lineup. Parham is willing to shoot jumpers, but he’s shooting 31% away from the rim. He is active on the offensive glass, so he generates some of his own baskets that way, and he can block a shot from time to time as well. |
|
|
Caedin Hamilton |
Center |
Jovan Milicevic |
|
Sophomore |
Class |
Sophomore |
|
6’9″ 245 |
Measurements |
6’10”, 241 |
|
4.3/4.1/0.8 |
Game line |
10.5/4.1/1.3 |
|
38.9/0/64.7 |
Shooting line |
39.8/41.1/62.9 |
|
|
Hamilton is in his third year with the program and has yet to take the leap the staff seems to be hoping he would. He has been thus far ineffective at any range on offense, shooting 46% at the rim and 15% away from it, has the highest turnover rate of anyone averaging more than 10 minutes a game, and does a decent job on the offensive glass. Any defensive value he brings to the table in the form of being a decent shot blocker is undercut by his tendency to foul a lot, a rate that has skyrocketed to 12.4 per 40 minutes in conference play. |
|
Reserves
Marquette’s bench typically goes 4 deep in terms of players who get meaningful minutes, although they do combine to give the 74th most bench minutes in the nation, that number is propped up by Zaide Lowery, who has left the team, and Sean Jones, who missed last game with a foot injury after also losing time earlier in the season to a shoulder problem. 6’11” Ben Gold is second on the team in minutes and started every game last season and of the non conference slate this season before being dropped to the bench. He is extremely effective scoring at the rim at 64% and simply refuses to do so, shooting 66% of his attempts from 3, where he is shooting 25% on the season. Again, he’s 6’11”. Gold is also the best overall rebounder on the team, especially on the defensive end. Damarius Owens is a 6’7” wing who is pretty effective on offense when he can get himself downhill and get to the rim and pretty ineffective when he can’t. He does a fair bit of work on the defensive glass and put up 15 and 7 against Georgetown, but has really only impacted the Albany game apart from that one. Aside from those two, no one else is averaging even 10 minutes a game with the absence of Lowery and Jones. Tre Norman is a junior guard who is very close to being the exact same player as he was as a freshman (good at the rim, bad at jumpers). Michael Phillips II has played double digit minutes in two of the last three games, and the best three point shooting mark on the team at 43%, but has yet to make a two pointer and has 7 turnovers to 1 assist. Josh Clark is 7’1” and has also played double digit minutes in two of the last three, mostly because he hammers the glass at both ends and Marquette is searching for answers in the frontcourt.
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Three Questions
– Where is Xavier? It’s in Cincinnati, I know that, but I mean where are they in terms of mental space. After Georgetown it was possible to squint and see a respectable Big East season. Then the Musketeers got destroyed by UConn and spit the bit at DePaul. What is going to motivate these guys to keep going? Realistically, it’s a long time until any individual game matters again.
– What is the plan? It’s not hard to see where the program is going, Coach Pitino seems to be building something. What is difficult to see is how exactly this Musketeers team intends to win games. They don’t shoot particularly well, the defense is just flat bad, and they play sort of but not really fast. Recently it seems there has been a focus on getting the ball inside, but doing that has not returned good results.
– What has happened to All Wright? All scored 10 on December 12th on a reasonable 4-7 from the floor and tossed in three assists for good measure. In what is basically a month since, he has scored eight points on 4-13 shooting. He hasn’t played badly, per se, so much as he has just vanished. Against DePaul he didn’t start for the first time since Iowa and played only 13 minutes.
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Three Keys
– Make some shots: Yeah, it’s that simple. When Xavier’s EFG% is over 50, they win. When it is under 50, they lose (except for Marist). This team is ludicrously dependent on putting the ball in the hoop.
– Take an early lead: Marquette is in free fall, but they aren’t comprised of scrubs. Give them a reason to believe and they just might. Xavier needs to stomp on the Golden Eagles early, take the crowd out of it, and settle in. That goes back to being able to consistently make shots.
– Find an identity: What is this team, exactly? They can’t really get buckets when they need one, they can’t really get stops when they need one. They currently look like a bunch of guys that enjoy playing together, but in that sort of way that a group thrown together at the local open run might. They have some chemistry, but not cohesion.
