For about seven minutes, we had some standard issue if not low scoring basketball at the Kohl Center on Saturday. A layup from Chase Ross pulled Marquette within one, 6-5.
And then Wisconsin scored 10 of the next 12 points. 16-7 Badgers.
It would be a 15-4 UW run before Marquette scored consecutive baskets again, so that made the lead 21-9. Wisconsin’s first half lead maxed out at 18, 34-16, with 4:41 to play. The margin was just 12, 43-31, at halftime, and with 15:25 to play, Royce Parham got a bucket
to make it an 11 point game, 54-43. Shaving one point off the halftime margin in four and a half minutes is not an accomplishment, I’m just pointing out what it was.
Why? Because Wisconsin answered whatever flutter of hope that 11 point margin generated by scoring six straight to go back up by 17.
An 11-0 run wrapped up with six and a half to go, and at that point, Wisconsin was up 82-56. That’s a 26 point lead….. which was not the largest margin of the second half. That was 27, which came with 5:09 to go off a three-pointer by freshman big man Aleksas Bieliauskas.
To remind you: The lead was 12 at halftime.
With 5 and change to play, Wisconsin was winning the second half by a score of 45-30. 45 points is a lot to give up in any half of college basketball. Marquette gave that up in 15 minutes. They gave up a 34-18 run after trimming one point off that halftime margin. I don’t want to throw around the Q word, but I think that we were all thinking it just now.
Yes, I started typing this before the game was over. 59 seconds left, UW up 96-74.
Wisconsin’s John Blackwell came into this game shooting 42% on the year on seven three-point attempts per game. He went 6-for-12 in this game. Did anyone at the McGuire Center even try to scout the Badgers before this game? Did anyone read the scouting report before the game started? Doesn’t seem like it, right?
I would like to know why Marquette spends every game looking increasingly like they don’t care about anything that happened in the previous games this season. I get that this is at Wisconsin, and it’s hard to win at the Kohl Center, and this Wisconsin team is generally on track for the NCAA tournament and Marquette very much is not….
….. but this is one hell of a half-assed performance from a team that absolutely should have been shamed into full-assing every single game the rest of the season a long time ago. Heck, head coach Shaka Smart even pulled the trigger on swapping Zaide Lowery out of the starting lineup in favor of Adrian Stevens, which makes sense after he benched Lowery for the final 22 minutes of the Valparaiso game. Whatever message that you think that the change might send? Didn’t take, it seems.
Gross.
Up Next: Marquette is going to take a week off [insert joke about MU taking this game off already here] and then come back next week with a trip to a Big Ten arena that’s actually even harder to win in as the road team. That’s a game against Purdue on Saturday, December 13, with tipoff on Peacock set for 1pm Central. I’ll let you know right now: I’m not going to be able to get to a computer or a TV until about midway through the second half at best because of other obligations, which is kind of nice for my mental health. The Boilermakers? They’re coming off getting evaporated, 81-58, by Iowa State on Saturday. Well, okay, apparently it’s easy for Iowa State to win at Mackey Arena.
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