Have you guys ever noticed that really terrific ideas come to you while you’re taking a shower? Or doing some other task that you’ve done a million times before and you can turn your brain off and accomplish it successfully and safely? The thesis statement for this blog comes directly to you from my brain wandering off while I was taking a shower and skipping merrily through the tulips of random facts and ideas floating around in there.
The short version is this: Saturday’s win over #4 UConn is the perfect explainer for exactly why the 2025-26 Marquette men’s basketball season has been so frustrating.
If I stand here after watching Marquette beat #4 UConn and look back to October, before the season started, I can see it now. This was the Marquette team that I expected to see all season long. Not necessarily “Can beat #4 in the country” night in and night out. But the Marquette team that we’ve seen since maybe the Xavier win onwards? 7-9 since then. Since the Providence win onwards, maybe? 6-6 in the last 12 there. Since the Creighton win onwards? 5-5 since then.
In October, I thought this Marquette team was good enough to make the NCAA tournament. Maybe not win a game, maybe not even avoid Dayton and the First Four, but get in? Seemed like a thing that they could accomplish. I was rapidly disabused of this notion as MU got blown out by Indiana, then blew a lead against Maryland, then flubbed the Dayton game, and so on and so on. This went from “I like the upside as long as some things we have questions about turn out okay.” Very few of the things were turning out okay, and things were rapidly falling apart. Marquette hit New Year’s Day at 5-9 overall and 0-3 in the Big East and riding a five game losing streak. Their first game of 2026 was the road trip to Connecticut, and that went pretty horribly with the slight exception of it clearly could have gone much worse than it did.
To that point of the year, Marquette was playing like the worst team in the Big East and #139 in the entire country according to BartTorvik.com’s data filtering system.
Since then, from the Xavier win onwards, through Monday’s results, Marquette has been playing like the #4 team in the Big East and #55 in the country.
From the Providence win onwards, Marquette has been playing like the #4 team in the Big East and #38 team in the country. Top 40 is shorthand for “obvious NCAA tournament contender” more often than not, and you could probably stretch that out to the top 50 given the nature of some top teams winning conference tournaments and earning automatic bids.
From the Creighton win onwards, Marquette has been playing like the #3 team in the Big East and #32 in the country.
Over the last four games, even with that horrible loss to DePaul in there, Marquette has been playing like the #2 team in the Big East and #26 in the country. I’ll go one step further here: Since February 19th onwards, Marquette has had the 2nd most efficient defense in the country.
We have been watching the Golden Eagles turn into an NCAA tournament caliber team over the past two months. They haven’t been perfect, the loss to DePaul at Fiserv is a terrific example of that. The team is flawed, even while they’ve been churning out analytically solid basketball. But I never thought this was going to be one of the best teams in the country, just a team that had the ability to make the NCAA tournament and maybe pull a big upset or two along the way to make sure they got in.
It turns out they did, and that makes everything else that we watched this season even more frustrating in retrospect.
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