How far into the top 10 can Kam Jones get before his senior year ends?
By now, you should be more than familiar with our series of regularly updating leaderboards for various Marquette Golden Eagles sports accomplishments. Keep checking back to that link in the previous sentence for our charts as the seasons continue to churn through history and MU’s various teams continue to create new memories and accomplishments.
In this one, we’re going to talk about a record that got blown out of the water in 2020 and we haven’t thought about it since: Men’s basketball career field goals made.
It’s no secret that Markus Howard shredded his way through a lot of the Marquette record book back in the day. He threw in 237 buckets in his senior season, and that shot him from a tie with Damon Key for the sixth most field goals in program history to the all-time record holder. He finished his final season — shortened at least a little bit by the COVID pandemic, mind you, with nearly 140 more baskets than Jerel McNeal, the previous record holder. McNeal himself went more than 50 buckets past Bo Ellis when he set the record, so that tells you exactly how far out in front everyone Howard ended up.
And now, here we are in 2024, about to make the turn into 2025….. and did you realize that Kam Jones is already in the top 10? Jones made eight buckets against Xavier on Saturday, December 21, and that gave him 624 for his career. That means he started the day with 616, one ahead of Tony Smith and thus already in ninth place all-time in Marquette history.
Honestly, that’s wild to me. In fairness to my brain, Jones has 107 baskets so far this season, which means he started the year with 517 made field goals, and thus “nowhere near” Don Kojis’ top 10 gatekeeping number of 603. Of course, if I had checked in on this and realized that Kam had put up at least 200 buckets in each of the past two years, I would have been able to guess that he could get into the 700s by the end of this season.
But that’s still wild to think about. Jones is easily on pace to become just the third man to ever score 700 baskets in Marquette history, trailing only Jerel McNeal and Markus Howard. In fact, at 8.2 buckets per game and 19 guaranteed games — 18 in the Big East regular season and one Big East tournament game — Jones is on track to finish his career with 779 made field goals. That would easily cruise past McNeal’s total and send him into second place.
It would also leave Jones about 90 field goals short of Howard’s record, so that seems wildly unlikely, barring a gigantic scoring explosion from Gary Parrish’s little homie from Memphis.
Here’s the chart as it stands after Marquette’s December 21st game against Xavier.