The 2025-26 college basketball season is right around the corner, so let’s dive into the Marquette men’s basketball roster and take a look at what to expect from each player this season. Going forward
in these Player Previews, we’ll be going in this order: The four true freshmen expected to play this season going in alphabetical order by last name — skipping past Sheek Pearson who is projected to redshirt — then moving on to the redshirt freshman, then the redshirt junior who missed last year, and then going through the returning players in ascending order of total minutes played in 2024-25.
We’re going to organize our thoughts about the upcoming season as it relates to each player into categories, as we always do:
- Reasonable Expectations
- Why You Should Get Excited
- Potential Pitfalls
With that out of the way, we move along to today’s entry in the series, which touches on what is possibly and perhaps even most likely the biggest question mark facing Marquette this season…
Sean Jones
Redshirt Junior — #22 — Guard — 5’10” — 185 lbs. — Columbus, Ohio
Let’s deal with the explanation as to why we’re talking about Sean Jones here, in between the freshmen who have yet to suit up for the Golden Eagles and play and the guys returning from the 2024-25 roster. It’s a simple explanation: I don’t know where else to put him.
Jones didn’t play for Marquette last season after suffering a season ending knee injury in January 2024. So we can’t put him in the order of players who have an average minutes played in 2024-25, which we’ll start next time out with Caedin Hamilton. It also didn’t make sense to go to Jones any earlier than now, as everyone else we’ve talked about so far is a mystery as to how they fit in for the Golden Eagles because they’ve never played a minute of college basketball. That’s not the case for Jones, we know what kind of a player he is — presuming that his rehab has restored him to 100% of what he used to be — so we can make a much more educated projection of how Jones fits in for Shaka Smart’s team. The fact that he may be the biggest hinge point of the entire season makes it a nice metaphorical touch to put Jones in between the freshmen and the returning guys.
We’ll get to the biggest hinge part in a second, but let’s put down some baseline knowledge and set the table with what has come before. Sean Jones has played 49 games in a Marquette uniform up to this point. 33 of those came as a freshman in 2022-23 when the Golden Eagles were on their way to a double Big East championship with Tyler Kolek steering the ship as the starting point guard. Jones averaged a bit over 12 minutes a game off the bench that year, shooting 42% from the field and less than 32% from long range. At his height, no one’s really asking him to rack up a lot of rebounds, but he did dish out over an assist per game and he ended up averaging 3.6 points per game.
Coming back as a sophomore, he was expected to play a slightly bigger role for the Golden Eagles, just in the natural course of “sophomores are expected to do more.” Through the 16 games he played before suffering his season ending injury, Jones averaged over 16 minutes a night and added 5.8 points, 1.5 rebounds, 2.0 assists, and nearly a steal per game. If you compare his per-40 minute numbers, those are all improvements from freshman to sophomore year, not just playing time assisted bumps. As I noted at the time in his Player Review that year, he had a top 400 assist rate and was just outside the top 100 in steal rate according to KenPom.com…. If he had played enough of the minutes in the season for him to qualify for the national leaders. I’d have to wager that his scoring would have been a little bit better off if his shooting had improved, but instead he went backwards from long range, connecting on just 25.7% as he went 9-for-35 across 16 games.
Reasonable Expectations
We’re going to presume that Sean Jones is 100% returned to his pre-injury form at this point. Head coach Shaka Smart said more than once late in the year last season that Jones was a full participant on the scout team in practice, and there would be no reason for him to be doing that if he didn’t have a clean bill of health from the training staff. There have been videos leaking out to the internets that show Jones being able to lift off and dunk in non-competitive settings, so we have to take all of this and start with the idea that he’s totally fine to play.
Thus, our reasonable expectation here is that Sean Jones is Marquette’s starting point guard. It is not that he turns in an All-American caliber season like MU has seen from their lead guard the past three seasons, just that he’s a perfectly competent, every night, no one’s doubting him Big East-caliber starter. He starts, he plays north of 25 minutes a night, he leads the team in assists, he defends his position, he scores when MU needs it. Maybe sometimes that means he’s the scoring leader because that’s what the opponent is giving up, maybe sometimes that means he scores four points but MU wins anyway. This role going to Jones is what the Shaka Smart developmental system is supposed to do: Guy learns how to take the reins, guy takes the reins. It’s time for Sean Jones to do that.
That’s about what the BartTorvik.com algorithm projects for him. 65% of the minutes, which works out to 26 a night, 9.8 points, 2.4 rebounds, a team high 3.4 assists. If you’re saying “oh, man, 3.4 is such a low number of assists,” two things. #1: That would have been #11 in the Big East last season, just barely behind Jahmyl Telfort’s 3.42, and #2: I very clearly said that we are not expecting an All-American caliber season out of Jones. Kam Jones had 5.88 assists last year, if Sean Jones goes in that direction, things are working out pretty darn well, but we’re not reasonably expecting it.
Why You Should Get Excited
But what if Shaka Smart and Nevada Smith have milled this thing down to the point where anyone who has been in the system for a minute or two can play like an All-American? Sean Jones’ natural speed and quickness make him a different kind of point guard from Tyler Kolek and Kam Jones, and what if that opens up different kind of angles on the court, both for him to take it to the rack and also to hit the open guy in the corner for a wide open three-pointer?
What if the season on the sideline allowed Jones to mature as a thinking player in the Smart/Smith offensive system, and he’s going to be an optimized version of the player we saw for 49 games? What if he’s unlocked something about using his speed to make Marquette better than what we saw in his freshman and sophomore year. He was growing as a player as a sophomore before that growth was cut short. Can he pick up further ahead than where he left off?
There’s lots of different things that can go right for Marquette this year that leads to the Golden Eagles turning into an NCAA tournament team in March. Jones turning into That Dude is one of those things. It doesn’t have to be, it could be two or three other things while Jones just punches his time card and turns in reliable point guard minutes.
But if this works the way that Shaka Smart presumably wants it to work, to the point of outrageous delight from Marquette fans everywhere… well, I’m not going to say no to that happening.
Potential Pitfalls
Let’s go to one that you’re not expecting me to say already.
Across his career so far, according to College Basketball Reference’s math on this, Sean Jones has a career turnover rate of 17.7%. That’s on seasons of 18.5% as a freshman and 16.6% as a sophomore, and he put up that 17.7% while assembling a career assist rate of 16.7%.
Tyler Kolek’s career turnover rate at Marquette: 19.9%, which is a little artificially inflated by his bad sophomore year.
“Oh, okay, Sean’s better than Tyler!” No. I didn’t say that. You can have an turnover rate north of 18% when your assist rate is THIRTY-EIGHT POINT EIGHT PERCENT.
Jones has to find a way to be a better distributor while not turning it over more. This isn’t an option. 16.7% isn’t going to work. He doesn’t have to clear 30% like the point guard for the last three seasons — we’re not expecting to be an All-American, remember? — but he has to be better than he has been, and that can not lead to him whipping the ball all over the court.
The one you were expecting: Sean Jones can not continue to shoot under 29% from behind the three-point line. That’s his career number: 28.9%. That stinks. It’s bad. You saw what happened last year when Kam Jones and David Joplin shot 31% and 32% on threes respectively. Jones has been worse for his career. That can not continue.
If you would like some signs of optimism that it will not: Sean Jones is a career 13-for-32 (40.6%) three-point shooter in 22 Big East games, including catching fire for 6-for-12 in the last five games that we saw him play in a Marquette uniform. The offensive system is dependent on the open guy catching and shooting a three-pointer when it’s kicked out to him. If Sean Jones is going to start and play 25 to 30 minutes a night for him, the ball is going to whip around to him wide open on a regular basis. He has to be enough of a threat to make teams care about leaving him. If he’s not, Marquette needs to find a point guard option that is enough of a threat.
And finally, to put a bow on all of this: How prepared is Shaka Smart to move off of big minutes for Sean Jones if any of these pitfalls come to pass? Perhaps the better question is: How prepared is the rest of the roster to solve for Sean Isn’t Working Out if they need to do that? What if there are problems with Jones running the show, but there aren’t better options, and then: What happens to this season if that’s the case?
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