I’m so tired.
Marquette women’s basketball hasn’t played a front-to-back solid 40 minutes of basketball since January 8th. They still had a five game winning streak in there, but that came to an end on Sunday
as the Golden Eagles fumbled a 12 point lead on the first bucket of the fourth quarter and a three point lead with 30 seconds to go in regulation on the road against Creighton.
That was the fourth straight game where Skylar Forbes came off the bench after missing a trip to Butler — a 64-60 victory — for personal reasons. She’s hardly seemed off since returning to the team, up to and including putting up a team high 21 points on with 8-for-12 shooting in just 28 minutes against the Bluejays.
Sunday against Creighton was also the fifth straight game where assistant coach Khadijah Rushdan wasn’t on the bench for the Golden Eagles, and at some point in the last week or so, her name disappeared from the team roster page. It was also the second straight game for Marquette without Olivia Porter in the lineup after she left the road trip against Georgetown after her leg buckled underneath her. We can discuss her value to the team on the floor if you want — that 85.1 Offensive Rating and 35% turnover rate according to BartTorvik.com is real ugly — but her yet unidentified injury is leaving the Golden Eagles shorthanded in terms of players that head coach Cara Consuegra had been trusting on the floor for big minutes this season.
It’s so much going on all at once: Team’s scuffling, coaching staff is shorthanded, there’s weirdness surrounding the all-Big East caliber forward, playing rotations are off because of both the weirdness and a possible season ending injury….. [exhales loudly]
Can we just get a no doubt about it win at the McGuire Center on Wednesday to shake some of all of this off? That would be real helpful…. if not to purge some of the bad vibes, then to avoid a likely four game losing streak, given that MU’s next two games are home against #1 UConn and on the road against a Villanova squad that should be in the NCAA tournament field.
Big East Game #16: vs Seton Hall Pirates (15-8, 9-5 Big East)
Date: Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Time: 6:30pm Central
Location: Al McGuire Center, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Streaming: ESPN+, with Bob Brainerd & Chloe Marotta calling the action
Live Stats: Stat Broadcast
Bluesky Updates: @AnonymousEagle
Marquette is 21-13 all time against Seton Hall. The Pirates have won two of the last three meetings, including earlier this season in South Orange. Last season’s game in Milwaukee was Seton Hall’s first ever win in the McGuire Center.
It would seem that Seton Hall is not the same team without Jada Eads. With her in the lineup for any length of time this season, the Pirates are 12-4, and all of their losses are, one way or another, explainable and understandable. Without Eads in the lineup, and throwing out their two losses to UConn, Seton Hall is 3-2 and two of the three wins are against Providence. Eads is done for the year, and in the last three games, all without her, SHU had to push away from Georgetown and hang on down the stretch for a six point win, gave up a bad fourth quarter burst to lose at home to Creighton, and never recovered from a mid-game run in a 67-61 road loss to St. John’s.
On January 14th, Seton Hall won a game against Marquette that was, to a certain extent, an NCAA-tournament play-in game at the time. Now? Their NCAA tournament hopes are coming apart at the seams, and if the committee is evaluating the Pirates based on what they look like with the roster they will have in the tournament, it’s going to be hard to say they’re worthy of a bid if this is how their results are going to go without Eads and her 41.8% assist rate in Big East games.
If you look at Seton Hall’s shooting percentages, it becomes hard to understand how Seton Hall won the first meeting between these two teams. Marquette held the Pirates to just 31% shooting from the field and 29% behind the three-point arc. However, the Golden Eagles had their own shooting percentage issues in the game, including connecting on just 41% of their shots for the full game and going just 2-for-12 from the field in the second quarter as they let the Pirates walk back down a 20-5 lead late in the first quarter.
Marquette’s biggest problem in the game was that they really didn’t have an answer for Mariana Valenzuela, who had a career high 26 points, helpfully powered by 4-for-9 long range shooting. Yes, she had four of Seton Hall’s seven three-point makes in the game, yes, this is frustrating. Not more frustrating than all three of Valenzuela’s buckets in the fourth quarter either tying the game or giving Seton Hall the lead at the time, but y’know, frustrating.
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