Going into the December 29th loss to St. John’s, Marquette was sitting at #56 in the NET. The loss knocked them to #66. Beating Villanova got Marquette back to #54. Losing to Seton Hall didn’t really affect anything in that regard, but losing to Georgetown in what BartTorvik.com’s Game Scores says is the worst performance of the entire season knocked the Golden Eagles back to #60, and other results around the country have them at #62 as I type this up on Monday afternoon.
I can’t tell you for certain
exactly where Marquette would be in the NET if they had made seven of the 14 layups they missed against the Red Storm, and didn’t give up that 17-0 run in the first and second quarters to the Pirates, AND didn’t give up a 19-0 run to start the game against the Hoyas. I’m pretty sure they’d be better off than #62, and I feel comfortable guessing that they’d be somewhere in the top 50. Somewhere in the top 50 has the Golden Eagles at least in the discussion for an NCAA tournament bid.
Instead, Skylar Forbes has just been out to lunch for the past two games, shooting 4-for-20 from the field, 1-for-9 from behind the arc, and committing six turnovers. Instead, Halle Vice was effectively benched against Georgetown, ultimately playing just 24 minutes while shooting 1-for-5 and pulling in just four rebounds, which was a far cry from her 32 & 11 performance in the win over Villanova or even just her recent run of four straight double-doubles and five in six games.
Instead, barring something along the lines of the Golden Eagles running the non-UConn table the rest of the way, their shot at making the NCAA tournament is about zero right now. That’s the difference between standing at 5-4 in the Big East and standing at 8-1. Seven layups and just not taking 18 minutes worth of a nap in two different games.
Big East Game #10: at St. John’s Red Storm (15-5, 5-4 Big East)
Date: Wednesday, January 21, 2026
Time: 7pm Central
Location: Carnesecca Arena, Jamaica, New York
Streaming: Peacock
Live Stats: Stat Broadcast
Bluesky Updates: @AnonymousEagle
Marquette is 23-14 all time against St. John’s. The Golden Eagles have won 10 of the last 14 meetings and 14 of the last 19, but the Red Storm winning in Milwaukee earlier this season means that they have won three of the last four encounters.
The 14 missed layups is what grabs the attention, but the fact of the matter is that St. John’s was leading Marquette for an awful lot of that first meeting between the two teams. The Red Storm did not do anything particularly special in that game, shooting just 45% on twos and just 35% on their 17 three-point attempts. Five different players got into double digits, but no one had more than the 14 that Beautiful Waheed scored on 4-for-14 shooting. Given how the last two have gone for Marquette, the fact that St. John’s could do nothing particularly special while beating them is a bad sign for a rematch.
We can almost say that St. John’s has used the Marquette win to bounce back from their nearly 40 point loss to Villanova one game before that. No one’s going to fault the Red Storm for a 45 point loss at UConn, but since that Huskies game, the Johnnies have been struggling something fierce. 49-39 at home over Butler sounds like no fun. 66-64 on the road over Xavier sounds like less fun, especially when you mix in the fact that it was 61-57 Musketeers with 2:50 to play and 63-62 Xavier with 50 seconds left. They got out of Cintas thanks to buckets from Sa’Mya Wyatt with 40 seconds left and a jumper from Shaulana Wagner with what the box score says is one second left, but there was enough of that one second for Xavier to have a chance to tie it at the horn.
But those aren’t the bad games.
The bad game is Georgetown 59, St. John’s 34. The Johnnies scored, by quarter, 8, 11, 6, and 9 points. They shot under 29% from the floor and just 2-for-23 from distance. The Hoyas were up 47-25 at the end of the third quarter.
How on God’s green earth did Marquette lose to this team, 14 missed layups or not? What the absolute hell?
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