The 2026-27 college basketball season is right around the corner, so let’s dive into the Marquette men’s basketball roster and take a look at what to expect from each player this season. Going forward in these Player Previews, we’ll be going in this order: The two freshmen going in alphabetical order by last name then doing the same for the three transfers, then moving on to the redshirt freshmen. After that, it’s the seven players returning from last year’s roster going in order of average minutes played per game last season.
We’re going to organize our thoughts about the upcoming season as it relates to each player into categories, as we always do:
- Reasonable Expectations
- Why You Should Get Excited
- Potential Pitfalls
With that out of the way, we hit the penultimate entry in our series as we talk about the guy who might actually be the lynchpin for how all of this shakes out…
Royce Parham
Junior — #13 — Forward — 6’9” — 235 lbs. — Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Where was Royce Parham sitting in your head say, five weeks ago?
When the Big East preseason poll came out, Royce Parham was named to the preseason all-Big East Second Team, making him one of the 11 best players in the conference heading into 2026-27. I didn’t even blink at that happening. Part of that, I think, is because Parham is quite clearly the second most important returning player on the team this season behind Nigel James. I can make an argument that he’s the third most important component of the roster behind Sananda Fru as well. If Marquette is projected as an NCAA tournament team, then obviously Parham has to be one of the 15 best players in the league, and it’s not really a surprise that he’s listed as one of the 11 best.
Can I throw this one at you?
Are the Big East coaches underrating Royce Parham?
Let me drop in a chunk of his player review from the end of last season:
Across the rest of the season — 19 Big East games because he missed the trip to Georgetown with late developing back spasms and MU’s one conference tournament game — Parham averaged 14.4 points and 5.0 rebounds in nearly 33 minutes a night, and he was just over an assist and just under a block per game as well. More importantly, it would seem that he got a massive confidence boost from the starting assignment. Parham shot 38.7% from three-point land the rest of the way and a very scary 66.7% on two-pointers as well. For Big East regular season games, Parham finished the season with the third best two-point shooting percentage and effective field goal percentage. Even with a not-so-hot 65% on free throws, Parham was still #2 in the entire Big East in true shooting percentage. Perhaps most importantly to the entire thing: Parham was taking about twice as many twos as threes in his last 20 games of the year. 62 triples, 123 attempts inside the arc. That’s a much more profitable situation for both Parham and the Golden Eagles
14/5/1/1/1 (we can round up his 0.8 steals to make this point), #3 in two-point shooting, #3 in effective field goal percentage, #2 in true shooting percentage, #8 in block rate, #10 in free throw attempt to field goal attempt ratio, #13 in three-point shooting percentage? That’s what he did in Big East play? Logging 33 minutes a night?
Are we SURE he’s not one of the six best players in the Big East going into the season?
And I ask this because all the way up to the point of opening up the stats pages and his player review from last year to set up to write this, my brain was locked on “yeah, Royce was good last year, he’ll be good this year, that’s why we should be optimistic for Marquette’s season.”
Was I being dismissive of what he actually is as a player? Forget potential, which we’ll get to in a section below, I mean literally did I just not realize what he brings to the table and/or just blur it out in my mind because Marquette was 12-20 a year ago and I mean how important could any of that actually be?
I’m not alone on the kind of just hand waving Parham’s contributions away as a “yeah, it’s fine, good for him” thing, right? Someone tell me I’m not alone here.
Join the conversation!
Sign up for a user account and get:
Reasonable Expectations
Okay, let’s back up a second.
Expecting Royce Parham to recreate the 14/5/1/1/1 he was averaging in Big East play last season for an entire season might be just a little bit too far. That was the peak of his two seasons at Marquette, and even though the level of competition is strong enough to make it believable that he could do that regularly, that seems like a lot. At the very least it seems like a lot if we’re setting this section as the “clear this hurdle or else your season is bad” marker for when we swing around to player reviews in the spring.
Then again…. the BartTorvik.com algorithm is spitting out 15.1 points, 6.3 rebounds, and 1.4 assists per game for Parham, and that’s in about 30 minutes a game. That, uh… that would be better than what Parham was peaking at last season, huh?
What if we split the difference? What if we just land it on career highs? Somewhere better than 12.5 points and 4.9 rebounds per game, which were his season averages last year. That and he shoots a little bit better than 33% on long range attempts.
That feels better for a reasonable expectation. Just expecting a step forward, not thinking he can expand his 20 game peak to an entire campaign.
Why You Should Get Excited
But what if he can expand that peak to a full 30+ game slate? What if Royce Parham is one of the six best players in the Big East? What if the confidence and strong decision making we saw continue to develop as last season went along keeps Parham’s skills and performance growing?
What if he’s ready to take a jump forward from his peak?
Every inch of development from a player on this roster not named Nigel James makes things easier for Nigel James as the star point guard around these parts. More scoring from everyone else = less scoring that Nigel has to do and a lot more assists for him, too. More rebounding and defense = less pressure on Nigel to make the offensive end work.
If Royce Parham finds an evolutionary step to his game, that raises the ceiling for Marquette in general this season.
Potential Pitfalls
Royce Parham has committed six fouls in 46 minutes of action across two exhibition games. That’s a clip of 5.2 per 40 minutes after seasons of 3.8 as a freshman and 2.7 as a sophomore. Maybe that’s a tiny bit of Small Sample Size Theater, but also Parham would have played more than 17 minutes against Green Bay if he didn’t have four fouls in that game alone.
Maybe it’s just two games and that’s life. Or maybe I’ve seen Royce Parham commit two of the ugliest and most obvious offensive hooking fouls that I’ve ever been witness to, one in each exhibition game, and now I’m concerned that he’s just prone to brain farts like this.
The part about this that’s most worrying is the fact that there’s no one really behind Parham in the rotation. If Marquette is going to have to labor through chunks of games while Parham battles through foul trouble this year, things might get a little weird. Are we trusting Michael Phillips to play minutes at the 4? Do we really think that head coach Shaka Smart is likely to use Sananda Fru and Josh Clark together like we saw for a little bit against Green Bay when Parham was really limited?
And not for nothing? What happens to Royce Parham’s defense when he starts laying off because he has foul trouble? Last year, Marquette’s defense was top 20 in the country type stuff against top 150 opponents when Parham was on the bench according to Hoop Explorer, and about 10 points per 100 possessions worse when he was on the floor. You can play Parham big minutes because he boosted the offensive output of the team just as much as the math says he was diminishing the defensive side of things, so that’s a trade off that you take.
But if he has to lay off defending because he has three fouls with 13 minutes left in the game… and there’s not even a really solid bench option to allow him to sit down, and he’s gonna need to sit down anyway for at least 10-ish minutes a game… well, maybe none of this will end up being a problem for the Golden Eagles. Cross your fingers?
Follow Anonymous Eagle on social media
Facebook: AnonymousEagle
Instagram: AnonymousEagleSBN
Bluesky: AnonymousEagle