Back about a week ago, Duke University announced that their men’s basketball team was 1) scheduling three non-conference games against UConn, Michigan, and Gonzaga and 2) arranging for those three games to be broadcast in a unique deal through Amazon Prime Video. At the time, my instant reaction was two-fold, neither of which really warranted a blog here. The first was “If the Duke players are going to be getting a big ol’ NIL advantage out of this deal, what are the players for the three opponents
going to be getting?” The second was “Well, this is what happens when Marquette fumbles the bag.”
In March 2024, Shaka Smart’s Golden Eagles earned their second consecutive #2 seed in the NCAA tournament. That’s a record best ever seeding for Marquette since the NCAA started seeding the field in the way that they currently do that. On November 25, 2024, Marquette moved into the top 10 of the Associated Press poll, and they would stay there for the next eight weeks. Marquette went into February 2025 with a record of 18-3 overall and 9-1 in the Big East, moving their 2-plus year long record to 74-20 overall and 40-10 in Big East play.
I don’t think that it is a crazy leap of logic to think that Marquette would be getting considered for this kind of partnership with Duke and Amazon if things had continued along on that trend. Maybe not over UConn if Duke was looking to partner up with one and only one Big East school, but a .787 overall winning percentage and a .750 winning percentage in Big East regular season games is the kind of thing that puts you in the “who are the best teams out there right now that we should align ourselves with to boost our non-conference profile” conversation.
Marquette is 17-28 since then. You don’t make the short list for the Duke/Amazon partnership when you fumble away your goodwill like that.
But that’s all there is to say about that, and it’s pretty obvious to every Marquette fan out there, so it’s not really worth putting the effort in to type that thought out. So I didn’t.
Move forward to Monday, when Gary Parrish and Matt Norlander got together on the CBS Sports Eye on College Basketball podcast and talked about this Duke/Amazon deal. They rummage around in the tiff with the Big Ten and Fox Sports regarding the Michigan game in there, and it’s all worth listening to, as their shows usually are.
About 15 minutes in, Gary Parrish elaborated on a point that started turning some gears in my head as to how this Duke deal does affect Marquette, or if not affect, then at the very least shines a light on the Golden Eagles in a particular way.
In theory, I’ve cued this up to start right at the section in question, but if not, skip to 16:13 if you want to hear GP say it himself. Otherwise, skip ahead and I’ve transcribed it.
What I love about it is that, and this is why also I believe in [Duke head coach] Jon Scheyer. Because I believe in smart people and he’s clearly a good thinker. He’s clearly sharp.
This opportunity has been sitting out there, theoretically, for a while, for people to tap into, and [Duke is] the program that did it. I promise you other coaches of big brands woke up the day after this was announced and were like, “Hold on, are we missing something here? Why didn’t we see this the way they saw it?”
I love it when people, particularly in college athletics, or at least I appreciate it, when they go, “Okay, what are the rules here? What’s going on?“
Because I promise you maybe somebody else thought about this at some point? And then somebody said “Yeah, but we can’t do that.” Well, Duke, they clearly said “Why not? Let’s think of a way that maybe get the get the smart people in here, get the lawyers in here. Let’s figure out if it’s possible to do this and then let’s try to do it.”
To be 100% clear about this: I am not saying that something is very wrong at Marquette because they’re not the ones coming up with this specific idea. Heck, Duke might not have come up with this on their own, it might have been Amazon that came to them. At the end of the day, Marquette does not occupy the spot in college basketball culture that Duke does and has for 30-whatever years, so MU is just not going to get to be the centerpiece of the highest of high level opportunities like this one very clearly is.
What I am saying is that I would like to know what ideas Marquette does have and is working on and is competing for and so on. What is Marquette doing in the scheduling innovation department right now? What meetings are going on at the McGuire Center where someone is saying “Let’s figure out if it’s possible to do this and then let’s try to do it?”
Right now, Marquette men’s basketball is not scheduled for any major Feast Week events for the foreseeable future… maybe because those are all collapsing in the wake of the expansion of the Players Era Festival, but still: Nothing on the books. We know about four games on Marquette’s 2026-27 schedule right now, and only two of those — a home-and-home with Michigan and the yearly series with Wisconsin — are arrangements that will show up again in 2027-28. Those are the only two games that we know about in the 2027-28 season, and after that, the only thing we can take as a known value for scheduling is the yearly series with Wisconsin continuing onwards.
In this time and place in the evolution of college athletics, what is Marquette doing to be innovative and creative? How are they scheduling in a way to draw extra attention to the men’s basketball program? How are they marketing the team? How are they going about community/fan outreach to build energy and excitement about the program? How does that ingenuity trickle down to gaining traction for women’s basketball as that sport explodes in general attention? The same goes for the attention for women’s volleyball, and remember: Marquette’s team still holds the title as Best Team On Campus and maintains a 14 year NCAA tournament streak heading into the 2026 season.
Maybe there’s a bunch of really cool announcements just around the corner, and we’ll all say “Ah, yes, I see what university administration is doing, nicely done,” in a month or two. Or maybe we’ll go into the 2026-27 school year saying “Huh, this all seems very uninspired,” and the questions about creativity and innovation will linger….
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