The Golden Eagles get the Wildcats at home in an effort to get back on the winning track in Big East play.
I’m just going to rattle off the BartTorvik.com predicted chances of victory for Marquette’s next five games.
48%
53%
66%
76%
90%
Either a coin toss or a heavily favored situation. Can’t ask for more than that if you’re Cara Consuegra after 15 games of your first season on the Marquette sideline. The team has started to come together into a cohesive unit, and three of their four scheduled games against top 50 competition are in the rear view mirror now. The only one remaining is the regular season finale at Gampel Pavilion against UConn. That’s a great place to put that last matchup with the Huskies. MU can basically ignore it for the rest of the season and just start focusing on stamping out win after win after win.
I’m not going to say it’s going to be easy for the Golden Eagles to do that. There’s a version of Wednesday night in Omaha where they don’t turn it over 15 times in the first half and thus go rampaging past Creighton for a tough road win. But they did turn it over that many times, and so this is where we are now. There’s going to be bumps and bruises along the way. Marquette’s probably not going to rattle off 13 straight wins between now and March 2nd.
But there’s reason to believe Marquette can win each and every one of the next 13 games. Can’t ask for more. One game at a time. Get this W on Saturday, and then do it again next time out. Do it again, and again. Just keep getting a little bit better and a little bit tougher.
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Big East Game #5: vs Villanova Wildcats (8-8, 2-2 Big East)
Date: Saturday, January 11, 2025
Time: 2pm Central
Location: Al McGuire Center, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Streaming: FloSports
Live Stats: Sidearm Stats
Twitter Updates: @MarquetteWBB
Bluesky Updates: @AnonymousEagle
Marquette is 18-16 all time against Villanova. The Wildcats had won six straight encounters with the Golden Eagles over the past three seasons, but MU snapped that run with a 50-48 Big East tournament quarterfinal victory last season.
The impact of what Villanova was doing on offense for the past couple of seasons was obvious. The entire Maddy Siegrist experience led into last year with Lucy Olsen grabbing up a big pile of that usage that Siegrist left behind, and the Wildcats just kept producing buckets. They’re not that far off from that production this season with Olsen having transferred to Iowa instead of sticking around on the Main Line, so all credit to head coach Denise Dillon for figuring out how to still have a top 50 offense per BartTorvik.com at this point of the year.
But as you can guess, I am going somewhere with this. Villanova was sneaky good on the defensive end of the court. Torvik rated the Wildcats as a top 35 defensive team for the past two seasons, and when you can score like they could score, that was more than good enough. This year? #89 per BartTorvik.com. Since a 4-1 start to the season? #122. If you trim it down to conference games only — and yeah, it’s still early — Villanova’s the #6 defense in the league. Third best team by way of Torvik’s math, but being carried by their offense.
Slowing down Jasmine Bascoe and Maddie Webber goes to the top of the list for Marquette’s defense in this game. Those two are VU’s only two double digit scorers so far this season, with Bascoe leading the way at 15.3 points per game. The good news? They’re not exactly efficient scorers. Bascoe and Webber lead the team in overall attempts per game — that’s how you end up as the leading scorers, of course — but they’re also the most likely three-point shooters. Bascoe’s only hitting 30.4% of her long range attempts, and Webber is slightly lower at 29.3%. If you can get them to settle for outside shots, you’re probably coming out with a positive result as long as you can collect the misses. You probably can, as Nova’s one of the 30 worst offensive rebounding teams in the country. Part of that is probably “getting back on defense” but they’re not a good defensive rebounding team, either.
It’s weird that those two are shooting it long range so much when Bronagh Power-Cassidy and Maddie Burke are right there. Burke hits nearly 45% of her 3.6 attempts per game, and you can argue that Power-Cassidy should be shooting more than 2.6 times per game. When you’re cashing over 51% of your three-pointers, start taking more of them.
Hopefully Marquette can avoid the turnover problem that plagued them against Creighton in this game. The Wildcats are ranked in the 270s per BartTorvik.com in terms of defensive turnover rate, meaning they’re not getting a lot of steals. As long as the Golden Eagles don’t invite their own problems, Villanova’s probably not going to create them.
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