Marquette Schedules A Home & Home Series w/ Purdue

We have always been playing the Boilermakers

The 2024-25 Marquette men’s basketball schedule is starting to take shape. With the Big East/Big 12 matchups reportedly out there (we’ll publish when it’s official because that will probably come with a schedule, too), Ben Steele of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel dropped some news that I had heard rumored about and floating in the wind: As confirmed to Ben by MU Deputy Athletic Director Mike Broeker, Marquette will begin a home-and-home series with Purdue starting next season. The Boilermakers will come to Milwaukee in November, and the Golden Eagles will visit West Lafayette and Mackey Arena the following season.

With the note that MU’s home game will be in November, I think it’s safe to say that both Marquette and Purdue are looking at this as a replacement for the Gavitt Tipoff Games. That series is not continuing after the contract ended following this past season mostly because the Big Ten coaches had a meltdown about what their schedule was going to look like with the addition of USC, UCLA, Washington, and Oregon for the 2024-25 season and going forward. It’s nice to see that both MU head coach Shaka Smart and Purdue head coach Matt Painter don’t really care about nonsense like that and instead are focused on making their teams better early in the season.

If your gut reaction to this news is “wait, what, again??” then you’ve been paying very close attention to Marquette’s schedule for the past few seasons. These two teams have met 12 times in history, and four of them have been since 2017-18. The two home arenas are just 219 miles apart by driving directions, but between the 1951-52 season and November 2018, they played just one time….. and that was because the 1969 NCAA tournament put them in the same building — The Wisconsin Field House, as it happens — with a trip to the Final Four on the line.

The Gavitt Games series gave us Marquette vs Purdue three times in six seasons which was completely insane and stupid. “Hey, let’s book a series with only a few Big East and Big Ten teams every single year, and repeat one of those possible matchups THREE TIMES.” Bonkers. As a result, by the end of this home-and-home series, Marquette will have played Purdue six times in nine seasons. I feel like the Xzibit Pimp Your Ride meme has come to life here. “We heard you like Marquette/Purdue, so we put Marquette/Purdue in your Marquette/Purdue so you can watch Marquette/Purdue while you’re watching Marquette/Purdue.”

Anyway.

Purdue’s coming off their fourth straight season as a top four seed in the NCAA tournament and seventh in the past eight seasons. 7-for-7 if you knock out the 2020 campaign where there wasn’t a tournament, but the Boilermakers were weirdly bad that year, going just 9-11 in Big Ten action. They’re also coming off a national championship game appearance where they got to experience the fun that is a fully armed and operational UConn battle station and lost by 15. The preliminary BartTorvik.com projections expect Purdue to still be pretty good at basketball next season even though two-time national player of the year Zach Edey will not return. With Braden Smith and Fletcher Loyer expected to lead the way, T-Rank has the Boilermakers as the projected 5th best team in the country heading into 2024-25 and the favorite in the Big Ten. That should be a pretty marquee matchup, as the same computer algorithm has Marquette at #14 in the country, trailing Xavier (yes, Xavier, this should make for an interesting summer check-in when we get there in July) and UConn at #12 and #13 respectively.

That gives us four known games on the schedule for Marquette next year. There’s the yearly Wisconsin game which will be in Milwaukee this time, a one-off “let’s make a trip to the Bahamas to do one thing and then come home” game against Georgia, and the aforementioned Big East/Big 12 contest. There’s no news about a Feast Week event or something similar, at least at this point, but the schedule’s starting to fill up pretty quick right now relative to playing high major opponents and only 11-ish games to play before Big East action starts. Might there still be something to announce? Maybe, but I’m not holding my breath at this point.