For a moment there on Saturday at Fiserv Forum, things were on the verge of perhaps the nadir of the 2025-26 Marquette men’s basketball season.
After a 7-0 burst put Marquette up 14-6 as the clock wound under the 13 mark of the first half, the Golden Eagles started to let the thing drift on them. Slowly but surely over the next 11 minutes, Butler took the air out of National Marquette Day, going on a 22-10 run in drips and drabs, never more than five points in a row at a time. Finley Bizjack connected
on his third three-pointer in a four minute span, and the visitors had pushed themselves out of their early hole and out in front, 28-24, with 2:14 left to go before halftime.
Teetering. Wobbling. One really good solid push, and the bad times were going to land very hard in downtown Milwaukee.
Instead, Royce Parham and Adrien Stevens hit three-pointers on either side of a Bizjack turnover and Nigel James hit two freebies in about a 70 second span, and Marquette went into halftime up four instead of down four like they were after the Bizjack triple.
Coming out the locker room on the other side, the game briefly turned into something of a Rorschach test, as Parham and Stevens hit threes in the first two minutes and the lead was suddenly 10, 38-28. That’s a 14-0 Marquette run bridging halftime, and the Golden Eagles weren’t done. Bizjack hit two more threes, but MU answered with an 8-0 run, and six of it came from Chase Ross who had an and-1 jumper and a three-pointer to get the Golden Eagles up 14 with 15:47 left.
Back to Adrien Stevens the offensive magic went, and two three-pointers from the freshman made it a 17 point game in Milwaukee with 13:58 to play.
It was far from over, but all Marquette had to do was play the Bulldogs to a standstill. They didn’t quite do that as Drayton Jones put the cap on a 6-0 flurry from Butler with a pair of free throws that got the visitor back to within 10, 57-47. Marquette’s answer? Back-to-back threes from Ben Gold and Chase Ross, two of the 14 triples that went in for MU on a 45% shooting day, and the margin was back to 16.
The scoring went into hibernation after that, and I don’t mean for Marquette and I don’t mean for Butler. Ross’ three was with 7:07 to go, the next bucket was BU’s Yame Butler getting a layup with 2:57 to play. It wasn’t fun basketball to watch, but when you’re cheering for the team that’s up 16, you don’t really complain all that much about time just evaporating. Besides: It meant that Butler went over six minutes without scoring at all and just a little bit longer than that without a field goal. That goes a long way to allowing just 0.82 points per possession to the Bulldogs in this game.
The end of the game got a little bit stupid, as Butler got it within 12 and was doing a trapping/pressing thing, and Chase Ross drained a dagger with 45 seconds left, MU up 15….and Butler kept trying to trap and press and frustrate MU after two misses with less than 30 seconds left, so Ross went ahead and banged home a dunk to provide a punctuation mark on the game. Memo to Butler head coach Thad Matta: You stink and you should feel bad about directing your team to be a bag of weirdos with under a minute to go and the game very clearly out of hand.
Chase Ross was the leading scorer here, getting 19 points on a very great 7-for-10 shooting afternoon with 4-for-5 coming behind the three-point line. Just think: He was only 5-for-8 and 3-for-4 before Thad Matta got weird at the end. Ross also added four rebounds, five assists, and three steals. Nigel James was solid with 16 points, even if he missed all five three-point attempts. He added two rebounds, four assists, and four steals, and perhaps more importantly to some of Marquette’s worse performances lately: Only two turnovers. Adrien Stevens had 18 points, Royce Parham had 12 points in a foul-hampered 24 minutes, and Ben Gold only had that one three-pointer to help jam the lead back to 16 points late-ish, but he hauled in 10 rebounds to end 10 Butler possessions. I’ll take that, yessir.
Highlights, courtesy of GoMarquette.com and Fox Sports:
Up Next: Marquette will take their quest to in back-to-back Big East games for the first time this season on the road for their next outing. That will be at Villanova on Tuesday, February 10, and TNT will have the 6:30pm Central time tipoff. The Wildcats have won three straight and four of their last five after downing Georgetown 80-73 in Washington on Saturday.
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