The Golden Eagles head down to Champaign for a return bout from last season with the Illini
There are obvious things to take away from the Marquette women’s basketball opener and say “Iiiiiiiiiiiiiii don’t know about that.”
Marquette shot just 33% from the field and a very no good 3-for-18 from beyond the arc with everyone not named Skylar Forbes going oh-fer on nine attempts. The game was sloppy, with the Golden Eagles committing 19 turnovers and quite often not really looking like they were on the same page with each other. They didn’t put a field goal through the rim in the second quarter until nearly the midway point and that let UCF build a 13 point lead that miiiiiiiight have ultimately contributed to MU’s inability rally all the way back at the end.
But they did make that 12-1 rally in the fourth quarter that made it a game with a minute to go. There’s an optimistic way to read that, and it’s that it took Marquette 35 minutes of live contact with an opponent to start coming together as a team this season. Merely figuring out how to play together was going to have to be a big part of the early part of this season, because that’s what happens when even the six returning players don’t have much in the way of experience in a real game with each other.
That’s not to say that’s everything is going to be seashells and balloons the rest of the way this season. More growing pains are coming, and if the preseason AP poll and one result for Sunday’s opponent are any indication, there’s going to be several pains coming in that one, not just the Champaign they’ll be playing in for the night.
That’s fine. A little healthy dose of “let’s figure this out together” is fine. After Sunday, BartTorvik.com has the Golden Eagles favored in eight of their next nine games, and all of the next 10 are at the very least just coinflip shots at a victory. Get through this one, start stacking wins, start growing as a team, see what happens when league play kicks up in a real way.
By the way….. Marquette might be on to something with Olivia Porter. Shocker of shockers, the player who was with head coach Cara Consuegra last year had a good game. But she was at a very ridiculous 5.7 in points over replacement player at her usage in the opener. That would have been a top 50 in the country number a year ago, roughly equivalent to what Flau’jae Johnson was doing for LSU. Just one game, of course, but let’s see if she can keep putting up consistent across the board numbers.
Game #2: vs RV Illinois Fighting Illini (1-0)
Date: Sunday, November 10, 2024
Time: 7pm Central
Location: State Farm Center, Champaign, Illinois
Television: Big Ten Network
Streaming: BTN.com or the Fox Sports app
Live Stats: Stat Broadcast
Twitter Updates: @MarquetteWBB
Bluesky Updates: @AnonymousEagle
Marquette is 6-2 all time against Illinois. The Golden Eagles dropped the first ever meeting in 1997, but it’s been 6-1 since then with the other loss coming in 2010. MU won the front end of this home-and-home series in the McGuire Center a year ago.
It would appear that there’s a strong chance that Marquette is the only thing standing in between Illinois and a spot in the AP top 25 on Monday afternoon. The Illini started off the year earning votes in the polling but not actually in the rankings. Their first game of the season just happened to be against a ranked team, and they beat #19 Florida State by nine points. Stands to reason they’ll vault straight into the top 25 after that, but they’re going to have to beat a Definitely Not Going To Be Ranked On Monday Golden Eagles squad to get there.
Illinois was up double digits for an awful lot of that game against FSU thanks to a 20-10 opening quarter. With that said, they did have to fend off the Seminoles in the final frame as it was down to a five point margin with 5:30 to play. Back-to-back buckets from Makira Cook and Adalia McKenzie got things going in their direction again, and they were never really threatened again. Cook and McKenzie were the leading scorers in that one, with both of them going for 20 points. Kendall Bostic just barely missed out on the party, finishing with 18 on 8-for-10 shooting. Bostic also barely missed a double-double, finishing with nine rebounds.
We’ll have to see if it’s just one game or what, but at the very least, the opener makes it look like Marquette might be able to focus on interior defense to have a chance at the upset. The Illini connected on just two of their 13 long range attempts in the game. Not only is that just 15% for a team that shot 33.5% a year ago, but it’s also just barely over a fifth of Illinois’ shots in the game. That’s not far off with what they did last season, so at the very least, the attempt rate is indicative of what kind of style MU will see from them.