Over in the Facebook comments on our recap of the Marquette men’s basketball loss to Wisconsin, reader Michael P. posed this question:
Can this team be fixed this year?
My gut reaction to that question was
this:
Step 1: Reversing the downward trend. I legitimately think they’re getting worse.
So, obviously, that made my brain start turning around that idea. Is Marquette men’s basketball getting worse as this season goes along, or am I just thinking that because none of the flaws are getting corrected from game to game and the lack of fixing anything makes it feel like things are getting worse?
I thought about that for a couple of days, and then I remembered: BartTorvik.com does graphs for all sorts of team stats. I grabbed some screenshots on Thursday morning to show you, and I’ll be honest: These are graphs that support the point that Marquette is getting worse as this season goes along. There also isn’t much in support of the idea that Marquette is getting better. The best that the other graphs could show you is that Marquette is roughly the same, give or take.
How about defensive effective field goal percentage? The thick yellow line shows Marquette’s average for the season as each game gets stacked on top, the black dotted line is a 5 game average, and the thin yellow line shows the trend line through the individual data points of each game.
How about Marquette’s free throw rate on offense? That’s the ratio of free throws to field goals, and head coach Shaka Smart has said lately that this team needs to get to the free throw line to help manufacture points.
How about opponents’ points per 100 possessions?
How about Game Score, which is taking a full total of how you played in a game and assigning it a value between 0 and 100? You can have a great Game Score in a loss, and a bad Game Score in a win.
How about T-Rank, the straight up ranking system for the site, taking everything about the team’s performances into account, adjusting for opponent strength and putting a dot on the board at every game?
And finally, this isn’t a measure of the team’s performance, but a gauge of, based on what they have done and what is likely to happen in the future, the odds that Marquette qualifies for the NCAA tournament in March 2026:
Things weren’t real optimistic for Marquette at the start of the season, as you can see the graph starts just a little bit underneath a 30% chance of making the tournament. But right now? It’s pretty much “win the Big East tournament” and that’s it. For clarity’s sake: Marquette is projected to go 7-13 in Big East contests by the computers, which would have them in a tie with Georgetown for 9th place. That would mean Marquette would have to win four games in four days to get the conference’s automatic bid. That’s not helping their odds of pulling that off, to say the least.
Is this conclusive evidence that the Golden Eagles are absolutely getting worse this season? No, not really. Like I said, there’s a lot of graphs that show Marquette as a pretty stable team across the first 10 games of the season. There’s just some things that they appear to definitely be getting worse at as time goes along, and well, if there were things to show you that MU was clearly getting better at, I’d show those to you.
But they’re not really there.
Lots of stable things + a few declining things + no improving things = It feels like they’re getting worse.
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