The Golden Eagles made up for the Butler loss with the Seton Hall win, but they have to keep moving forward with a home game against the Blue Demons.
Couple of games back, I pointed out that Marquette women’s basketball had reached a mathematical opportunity. Because of their record and the record/standings spot of their opponent that day, Cara Consuegra’s team had a chance to clinch that they would finish better than the Big East preseason coaches poll said that they would finish.
They lost that game.
Which is a bit of a step back from the forward progress that the Golden Eagles had been showing this season.
And then they went out east in the very next game and beat third place Seton Hall in their gym.
Which is a bit of that forward progress back in place for Marquette.
Skylar Forbes and her teammates have a notable opportunity on Saturday at the McGuire Center. Namely, they have a chance to keep that rediscovered progress going. But there’s some Big East standings stuff involved here as well. Right now, heading into Saturday, 8-5 Marquette is just now one game behind 9-4 Seton Hall for third place as well as tied with Villanova. It feels like there’s going to be some jockeying for the third/fourth/fifth place spots in the standings as things come down the stretch, and all three of these teams are done playing each other for the year. Any win you get is only helpful to you, and not damaging to one of the other squads.
But that’s not the only thing going on here for Marquette.
At 8-5 on the year and with three teams holding 10 losses, the Golden Eagles have moved into a situation where they can only at worst end up in a tie with those three teams. A win on Saturday, no matter what those teams do on Saturday or Sunday, means that Marquette will finish ahead of them in the standings. With Xavier down in last place at 1-13, Marquette has a chance to clinch not just finishing better than 10th in the Big East this season, which is where they were picked in the preseason poll, but they can clinch finishing no worse than seventh.
If Marquette gets some help from #24 Creighton on Saturday, the Golden Eagles will clinch finishing no worse than sixth.
It’s important to point out two things right now.
#1 is that teams that finish sixth and worse in the standings have to play on the opening day of the Big East tournament.
#2 is that DePaul, Saturday’s opponent, is the team currently holding sixth place….. and Marquette already won in Chicago earlier this season.
A win on Saturday can not clinch that MU will finish top five. But the win will give Marquette the head-to-head tiebreaker, and just one more Marquette win or DePaul loss after Saturday will be enough to clinch that thanks to the tiebreaker. All they have to do is go out and prove that they deserve the spot by keeping the forward progress going.
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Big East Game #14: vs DePaul Blue Demons (12-15, 7-7 Big East)
Date: Saturday, February 15, 2025
Time: 2pm Central
Location: Al McGuire Center, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Streaming: FloSports
Live Stats: Sidearm Stats
Twitter Updates: @MarquetteWBB
Bluesky Updates: @AnonymousEagle
Marquette is 38-49 all time against DePaul. The Blue Demons have controlled the series 23-20 since the two teams have joined the Big East, but the Golden Eagles have won eight of the last nine and each of the last six in a row.
Back when Marquette played DePaul down in Chicago, I pointed out that a lot of DePaul’s reasons for being 6-8 on the year coming into the game had to do with the fact that they had intentionally scheduled themselves a bunch of really tough non-conference games that they kind of had no business playing based on the kind of team they were probably going to have in 2024-25. That point was largely borne out as the Blue Demons started out Big East action 4-1 with that loss to MU in there, and you could even extend that to their 6-3 start, as they took losses to Creighton and Villanova on the road.
But now they’re 7-7, and it’s still not entirely their fault as a basketball team. Losing at home to UConn by 26 isn’t a problem. Losing by six at home to Villanova isn’t a problem. Losing at home by 17 to that Seton Hall team that Marquette just beat — with Savannah Catalon in the lineup admittedly, but still — is a problem, but it’s not their biggest problem.
Losing by 13 at Providence is.
Even worse: They were down 17 before the game hit the midway point of the second quarter. DePaul found a way to trim that margin down to just three early in the fourth quarter but didn’t have enough to bring it all the way home. That W is one of four on the year in Big East action for the Friars, and two of the other three are against Xavier.
Marquette won the first meeting between the two squads fairly handily, jumping out to an 18-8 lead at the end of the first quarter and then expanding that lead by the end of each of the next two periods for a 78-59 victory. The margin was pretty tilted towards Marquette, but that doesn’t mean that everything went great for the Golden Eagles. MU really couldn’t do much to slow down Jorie Allen, who tallied up 24 points on 10-for-18 shooting, all of which was inside the three-point arc. Here’s the catch: Four of Allen’s misses came before she picked up her second foul with 6:02 left in the first quarter. That means she shot 10-for-14 when she returned to the game in the second half. Marquette was up 16 at that point, so it’s not the world’s biggest problem, but it’s also not something you’d like to recreate on your own floor. Allen is DePaul’s leading scorer at just under 20 points per game, and she’s doing that while attempting just 10 three-pointers all season.
That’s a riddle that the MU defense is going to have to solve, and they’re going to have a new wrinkle thrown at them as well. Kate Clarke missed all of DePaul’s first 18 games, came back for four, missed another three — including that loss to Providence — and was back in the lineup for each of the last two contests. The three misses in the middle seem unrelated to the leg injury that kept her out to start the campaign, but the fact of the matter is that Clarke is averaging 10.7 points per game in the six contests she’s played this season. She’s also going to launch it from behind the arc, jumping straight to the front of the line in terms of attempts. The 6’1” junior is firing off threes at a clip of 6.5 per game and no one else in the DePaul rotation is doing better than 4.6 this season. Clarke is only hitting 33% of her tries, but in between 1-for-6 in her first game and 1-for-4 last time out against Nova, she went 11-for-29. 38% might not be world-breaking, but it’s a better option than anyone else on the roster.
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