I think I can safely speak for all Marquette men’s basketball fans everywhere when I say that there isn’t an obvious thing to point at to generate optimism for the 2025-26 season. That’s a new thing for head
coach Shaka Smart in Milwaukee.
Year 1: It’s Year 1! Fresh start, let’s see what happens!
Year 2: Hey, last year was a Vibes Only season, and they pulled an NCAA bid out of it! Lots to like here.
Year 3: They’re bringing back most of a Big East double championship team that earned the first NCAA tournament #2 seed in program history! This is going to be a hoot!
Year 4: Hey, Kam Jones looked great as the point guard while Tyler Kolek was hurt, things will be different, but I can see how it works.
See? You don’t have anything like that for this season, do you?
What we do have is a lot of If’s. Think about the conversations that you’ve had with your fellow Marquette fans since last season ended. How many times have you said something along the lines of:
- If Chase Ross can stay healthy for a whole season, we could see that leap we’ve been expecting to see since his freshman year.
- If Sean Jones is all the way back from his knee surgery, I bet Shaka Smart and Nevada Smith can coach him into being a Big East caliber point guard.
- If someone can jump forward to be that defensive pest that Stevie Mitchell was for the last three years, that answers a lot of questions about that end of the floor.
- If Josh Clark and Caedin Hamilton can combine one way or another to be a legitimate starting center in the Big East, I’m feeling a lot better about this team.
- If Ben Gold can go back to being a mismatch at the 4 instead of a required presence at the 5, that unlocks a lot of things about this team.
- If the whole team bounces back to shooting at least 35% on three-pointers like they did in Kolek’s last two seasons instead of 32.6% like this past year, everything else takes care of itself.
- If they can find a way to get back to getting easy buckets at the rim, that’s going to open the floor up for shooters better and make the team less reliant on hitting threes.
- If Nigel James can be a backup point guard, Marquette will have a legit backup at that position for the first time in a couple of years, not just letting Kam Jones and Tyler Kolek switch spots on the floor for a few possessions.
- If the light suddenly goes on for Tre Norman, that changes the rotation depth on the team and gives Shaka the Good Problem of finding minutes for everyone.
- If what Zaide Lowery did at the end of last season was him making a jump, I wonder if he’s ready to make a leap this year.
- If the whole team can just avoid those nicks and dings and nagging injuries that don’t actually prevent them from playing, the ones that that eat away at their effectiveness, stuff like “Hey, Stevie Mitchell needed hip surgery, who knew,” I think that’s a net positive for the season.
- If Royce Parham and Damarius Owens are ready to be load bearing rotation pieces as sophomores this year, that raises Marquette’s ceiling.
- If at least two of these four available freshmen pop as rotation guys right away, I think that’s a win for the Golden Eagles.
- If someone — I don’t care who! — establishes themselves as the go-to scorer that every team needs, that’s going to make things a lot easier on Marquette night in and night out.
- If all of this comes together into at least a tournament bid, then that proves that Shaka Smart’s refusal to use the portal and rely exclusively on internal development is a viable option going forward.
These are things that have come up here or there, right? These are all things that we’re going to dive deeper into as we get into the individual player previews over the next few weeks. If you haven’t said these things out loud to another human being (or texted them, shouts to the group chat), then you’ve thought about some of them, right?
And what do all of those things have in common?
I started each and every single one of those sentences with the word “if.”
If. If. If. If. Iiiiiiiiiiiif.
So very many ifs.
All of the ones that I listed out above are probably not all of the ifs that you can assign to this season as we go into it. If you’ve got other ones, I’m more than happy to hear them in the comments. But my point is this: They don’t all have to work out for Marquette to mark this season as a success. Several of them probably do, but not all of them. Just enough to make it work.
But there’s a lot. There’s no way to get around that right now.
And until we see the wins start to stack up in November, we’re going to keep asking them.
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