The Golden Eagles head to Ohio for what might be a litmus test for how they’ve developed as a team this season.
There’s a lot of ways to measure success for a college basketball season. When you have a first year head coach and six brand new players like Marquette does this season, then there’s a lot of possible criteria that apply to you when it comes to measuring success.
With the Golden Eagles currently riding a seven game winning streak, there’s a lot of reasons for optimism that when we get to March, we’ll be able to call this season a success. But that’s a long way off from now, and a lot of things can happen. On Wednesday night, Marquette will be out on the road against a team that I think provides an interesting litmus test for 1) where MU is as a team to this point of the year and 2) where Marquette stacks up in the Big East.
Bowling Green currently sits at #111 in the NET and #131 in the BartTorvik.com rankings. There are seven non-Marquette Big East teams better than that in the NET right now and eight non-Marquette BE teams better than that in the Torvik rankings. If Marquette thinks they have the gas to be at the very least a feisty team in the Big East this season, then they should be able to beat Bowling Green. Look no further than the fact that the Falcons are coming off a 78-59 home win over a not good maybe bad Xavier team. BGSU is capable of thumping the Big East team that Marquette should be capable of thumping when they pop up on the schedule.
Beating Bowling Green won’t say anything in the affirmative about where the Golden Eagles are going this season. It’s not going to tell us that “oh, yes, this is obviously an NCAA tournament team” or anything like that. But if MU thinks they’re going to be able to compete against top 100 teams like Georgetown and Butler and Villanova and Seton Hall, especially when they go to their buildings, then the Golden Eagles should be able to find a way to scratch out a sneaky important win in northwest Ohio on Wednesday.
Game #10: at Bowling Green Falcons (5-4)
Date: Wednesday, December 18, 2024
Time: 6pm Central
Location: Stroh Center, Bowling Green, Ohio
Streaming: ESPN+
Live Stats: Sidearm Stats
Twitter Updates: @MarquetteWBB
Bluesky Updates: @AnonymousEagle (at least in the first half, lousy two-game day)
Marquette is 0-1 all time against Bowling Green. The only meeting came back in 1992, with the Falcons getting a 105-103 double overtime victory at a December event hosted by Purdue.
Playing Bowling Green at the Stroh Center gives me an opportunity to drop this video about the major donors to the Stroh Center construction into this preview. It is 13 years old, and I love it as much as the day I first saw it.
There’s probably an argument to be made that this has been a tiny bit of a disappointment of a season so far for Bowling Green. No one’s faulting them for getting run out of the building in their road trips to West Virginia or Ohio State with both teams in the top 20 of the NET as of Tuesday morning. They picked up a win over Arkansas in the Daytona Beach Classic, but the Razorbacks aren’t even a top 125 NET team at the moment, so that’s not even as great of a W as you’d like to get from beating an SEC team on a neutral floor. The Falcons took a road loss against Cleveland State, and with a seven point margin in what is currently one of just seven games outside Quadrant 4 on the BGSU schedule, that’s a drag. Also a drag: taking a 73-66 loss on the road against Detroit Mercy in the first week of the season. The Titans might be a perfect 6-0 outside of their two games against their Big Ten in-state rivals, but that’s still a Quadrant 4 loss for Bowling Green.
All told, for a team picked to finish fourth in the MAC after going 16-15 overall with a 10-8 mark in the conference, I think the sum total of nine games tilts towards a slight disappointment here. You know what’s weird about that 4th place pick in the preseason poll? For whatever reason, the coaches also pick a team to win the conference tournament…. and even though BGSU didn’t get a first place vote in the regular season poll, someone picked them to win the conference tournament. That’s weird, right?
As you would expect for someone who was named to the preseason all-MAC First Team, Amy Velasco leads the Falcons in scoring. The 5’7” senior has taken a leap forward from last season, putting up over 19 points a game so far this year. Part of that leap has been her three-point shooting, as she’s currently attempting a career high 3.9 long range shots per game and making a career best 45.7% of them. She’s not BGSU’s most frequent threat from the arc — that’s Paige Kohler at more than six attempt per game — but Velasco’s definitely their most accurate threat. Even though she leads the team with coming up on 20 points a game, Velasco leads them in assists with more than five per game. That means she’s responsible for roughly 30 points per game either by shot or pass.
The shooting is one thing Marquette’s going to have to watch out for from the Falcons. The other major thing is their offensive rebounding. BartTorvik.com has them as a top 70 offensive rebounding club, which means if they miss those threes, there’s a solid chance that Bowling Green is going to get another crack at it. With that said, MU might be catching a break. 6’1” sophomore Taya Ellis leads the team in rebounding at nearly nine per game, but she’s missed the last three games. I can’t find an update for her, not even in the BGSU game notes, so that’s up in the air. With that said, Laila Harrison, Erika Porter, and Lauren Gerken are all marked as plus-rebounders on the offensive end by the Torvik rate math, so MU will have more than enough problems to deal with. Porter’s getting it done on both ends in terms of rate, and with Ellis out of the lineup, the 6’2” forward from New Jersey is the top rebounder at 5.6 per game.