Obviously it was good news that Marquette bounced back from two of their worst performances of the season to get a win against St. John’s back on Wednesday. Winning a game = good, full stop.
Now.
Marquette
was not exactly inspiring anyone with confidence through that 40 minutes of basketball, especially not anyone who saw them fall behind 19-0 against Georgetown in the previous game, and definitely not anyone who saw them immediately waste a 20-5 lead against Seton Hall and blow an eight point third quarter lead in that same game against the Pirates.
In short: For the third straight game, everything looked really, really hard for Marquette. Yeah, sure, there’s ups and downs and swings and whatevers for every team, but the Golden Eagles were rolling after beating Xavier on the road shorthanded and then crushing both Villanova and Creighton at home. That was not the case in the last three games.
It’s possible that we can just chalk up a lot of Marquette’s problems to “hey, the three-point shooting disappeared on them. Going all the way back to the Creighton game, Marquette has gone four straight contests with somewhere between passable shooting to bad shooting, including going 4-for-21 (19%) against Georgetown. MU might have the seventh best three-point shooting percentage in the country this season, and they’re actually sliiiiightly better in their 10 league games, but that number has been coming down as of late.
Marquette is in a stretch of their schedule where they can, in theory, on paper, shake some problems out. On paper, the Golden Eagles are favored in four of their next five games, and the other one is a toss up, just like the sixth game down the line. Good, clean, fundamental, back-to-basics, Marquette basketball should carry the day in this game in Indianapolis on Sunday. Lots of hustle, very little Cara Consuegra throwing her hands up as if to say “what the hell am I supposed to do about this?” like we saw against Georgetown, and we should — should — see a win on Sunday.
Big East Game #11: at Butler Bulldogs (9-11, 3-7 Big East)
Date: Sunday, January 25, 2026
Time: 1pm Central
Location: Hinkle Fieldhouse, Indianapolis, Indiana
Streaming: ESPN+
Live Stats: Stat Broadcast
Marquette is 24-10 all time against Butler. The first ever meeting was in 1986, and like all of the first four, the Bulldogs came away victorious. Since 1991, Marquette has lost just six times, but the sixth time was last February in Indianapolis, snapping a 10 game winning streak by the Golden Eagles. MU did make the first step towards a new winning streak with an 80-55 victory in Milwaukee earlier this season.
That 80-55 game was back in early December, and it moved the Bulldogs to 0-2 in the league. They won two buy games after that and beat Xavier at home for their first Big East win…. and then the wheels came off their season. Four straight losses, although the first one was against UConn, a home 10 point win over Providence, and then a road loss to Villanova. Butler is coming off a win, as they grabbed control against DePaul relatively early on and just rode that through to a 73-67 victory.
I know that 80-55 margin in the first meeting can make you think that Marquette should roll through this game relatively easily, but that’s really not the story of what happened in that game. MU outscored Butler 48-9 across various runs in the game, including 22-7 in the fourth quarter. See, the Golden Eagles were only up 13 going into the final 10 minutes. You’d rather be up 13 through three quarters than anything else, but considering the fact that MU was shooting 8-for-15 from behind the three-point line at that point, you could really make the argument that Marquette should have been up a bit more than they were.
Two names to keep an eye on here for Butler are Caroline Dotsey and Lily Zeinstra. Dotsey finished with 16 points on 6-for-12 shooting in the first meeting, and she added eight rebounds, too. She was 4-for-7 on shots inside the three-point line, so her 2-for-5 outside of it is totally fine and arguably good, at least for BU head coach Austin Parkinson. Zeinstra came into the year as Butler’s only returning rotation player, and no, she did not have a good day scoring against Marquette in the first meeting. She did, however, have six of Butler’s 17 assists in the game, and that’s six helpers on just 22 buckets that Zeinstra herself did not score.
One way to limit Zeinstra’s assists? Well, it’s hard to say that this is going to work because she had six under these circumstances, but holding Butler to just 35% shooting again will go a long way in that direction. Same for limiting the Bulldogs to just 21% three-point shooting. Butler doesn’t take an outsized number of three-pointers as a function of their offense, but they do shoot it pretty well both inside and outside the arc on average. Not great, not elite, but definitely well enough to make things interesting if you let them get the shots that they want.
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