With the 2025-26 season long since in the books, let’s take a few moments to look back at the performance of each member of YOUR Marquette Golden Eagles this year. While we’re at it, we’ll also take a look back at our player previews and see how our preseason prognostications stack up with how things actually played out. We’ll run through the roster in order of total minutes played going from lowest to highest, and today we move on to
Michael Phillips II
Freshman —#35 — Forward — 6’6” — 195 lbs — Rolesville, North Carolina
WHAT WE SAID:
Reasonable Expectations
I want to start here with Michael Phillips’
current recruiting rankings. He’s #105 in the country according to 247 Sports’ internal system and #144 in their Composite. On3 slots him in at #144 in their Industry Ranking. ESPN is an outlier at #99 and remember: They only rank out to 100 spots.
That’s all in the Class of 2025, of course. However, when Phillips committed to Marquette in August 2024, on his 17th birthday, he was a Class of 2026 prospect that was reclassifying to start college right now, shortly after his 18th birhday. Why am I making this point?
Because at the time, On3 had Phillips ranked #33 in the country in 2026.
There are reasons for that, and if you click on that link, you can go read Jamie Shaw explain why they were the only recruiting company that had the North Carolinian not just in the top 40 but ranked at all at the time. The point I’m making here is thus: How close is Phillips to being a guy worthy of being a top 40 prospect when it’s currently a year before he was “supposed” to be enrolling in college?
Even better, and more in tune with our point for reasonable expectations: How close is Michael Phillips to being a contributor on this year’s team? To put it another way: Sheek Pearson was a consensus top 75 prospect in the Class of 2026 when he committed to Marquette, with ESPN ranking him in the top 40. Now he’s somewhere between #70 and #138 with ESPN keeping him out of the 2025 top 100…. and Pearson’s going to redshirt….. but there’s no announced plan to do the same with Phillips even though he looks like he’s not pulling in the same kind of current rankings.
To drive all of this home, the BartTorvik.com projections for Marquette this season have Phillips as one of the top 10 contributors. You might think that sounds exciting and good, but it’s with 9% of minutes projected. 9% of 40 is 3.6 minutes per game, which is roughly long enough to say “well, he’s playing but never gets a chance to do anything.” 9% of minutes is less than what Caedin Hamilton did in Big East play last year, just to give you an idea of what we’re talking about.
Why You Should Get Excited
But what if Phillips is ready to be a top 40 prospect like On3 thought, just a year earlier? What if ESPN is right about Phillips as a top 100 prospect this year? What if his high school coach’s views of Phillips as a similar shooter to Kevin Durant is right? What if DeShannon Morris is right about Phillips fitting in perfectly to Shaka Smart’s program, so right to the point where he didn’t let the fact that his former player Keeyan Itejere didn’t quite work out in Milwaukee slow him down while letting Smart and his staff know about Phillips?
Marquette is in need of a breakout player this year. Honestly, probably multiple breakout players. They return one player who averaged more than eight points a game last year and one player who averaged more than four rebounds per game. There are multiple roles available for someone to jump forward and grab one. Why can’t it be a guy like Phillips that everyone seems to agree that he has tremendous upside?
Potential Pitfalls
I think I outlined the biggest possible pitfall for Phillips while trying to nail down what’s a reasonable expectation for him: What if he is actually a year away from being able to be a contributor at the high major Division 1 level? There’s nothing wrong with that, he’s a freshman, sometimes it takes a moment to get it together and make the jump to a more difficult level of competition.
The other part of the problem here for Phillips is who he might have to beat out for playing time. At 6’6” and 195 pounds, I don’t think he’s going to get a lot of minutes playing the 4 on this roster. Listed as a forward, I don’t think he’s going to be earning a lot of playing time at point guard.
So: Is he getting minutes in front of Chase Ross? Zaide Lowery? Damarius Owens? Seems unlikely, right? Can Phillips distinguish himself ahead of Ian Miletic or Adrien Stevens amongst only the freshmen on the wing? That’s more likely, but we’re talking about splitting 80 minutes of court time between three returning guys and whatever minutes the freshmen can soak up. 25-25-25 for Ross/Lowery/Owens is 75 of the 80 right there, so unless Phillips shows himself to be undeniable at a particular task, I don’t know if we’re going to see much of him this year.
I have four things I want to point at in Michael Phillips’ freshman season that I think explains pretty much everything that needs to be explained.
The first is that he scored 60 points in 223 minutes played this year. However, nine of those points came in the final two minutes of a 100-82 victory over Southern, where Phillips hopped off the bench having not played at all in that game to that point — mostly because MU was up just single digits at the half and needed a 12-0 run to go up 21 with 10 minutes left — and splashed all three long range field goal attempts he managed to fit into the game. In Marquette’s final game of the year, the 89-87 loss to Xavier in the Big East tournament, Phillips played 13 minutes, his second highest total of the season, and threw in 10 points, his season high.
That’s 19 of his 60 points in two games, all in 15 minutes of action. In his other 208 minutes this year, Phillips scored just 41 points. On a per game basis, that means he scored just 1.6 points per game in the other 26 games he appeared in. This is not “boo, he’s bad, booooo,” this is “actually, somehow, Michael Phillips really had a much smaller impact on this season than his stats make it look like he did.” And the stats aren’t that impressive!
The second is this: Michael Phillips waited until there was 4:21 left in the first half of Marquette’s Big East tournament game to hit his first two-point bucket of the year. He went into Madison Square Garden sitting at 0-for-11 on the year, and he hadn’t even attempted a two-point bucket in his last six appearances of the season going into what turned into the season finale.
AND THEN HE HAD A SECOND LAYUP BEFORE THE FIRST HALF ENDED. 2-for-2! All in a four minute window! After nothing to that point of the year! I don’t know what to do with this information, but it feels important.
The third thing sends us back to Marquette’s 66-65 home win over Xavier on January 7th. From my recap:
And then I was not able to say that for a good long while. A bad inbounds pass under the bucket led to the ball bouncing past halfcourt, and Michael Phillips did the one thing you can not do: Bat at the ball to just stop its motion. If it was tipped by Xavier, you have possession of the ball if you pick it up. If it wasn’t, then it’s an over and back, and Xavier has to inbound the ball. Instead, the Musketeers picked it up, Shaka Smart was livid at his freshman wing, and Roddie Anderson hit a three for the second bucket in an 11-0 run by the visiting Musketeers.
Pinning the entire 11-0 run by the Musketeers on Phillips making a boo-boo there is not cool, but that Anderson triple kickstarted Xavier’s run. You also have to ask the question of how the end game might have gone instead if Phillips had done anything but what he did and Xavier had merely not gotten what amounts to those three free points. Might have been a little less stressful, right?
And the fourth thing really puts a nice bow on the entire Michael Phillips freshman year experience. From my recap of MU’s 76-73 loss to Villanova, just three days after the win over Xavier:
Marquette lost because they had one field goal in the final three minutes of the game after James capped a 6-0 burst to get the Golden Eagles within one. Two stops on the other end, chances to make something happen. Instead: A Chase Ross missed three and a Michael Phillips airballed three at the end of a scrambled possession with 40 seconds left.
Again, I’m picking on the young man here to a degree. The fact of the matter is that he was thrust into a “Marquette needs big shots against a team earning AP top 25 votes” situation, and came up very short when the ball kicked in his direction. Why was he thrust into that situation? Because Damarius Owens only deserved seven minutes in that game and even though he played 16 minutes, we can not under any circumstances say that Tre Norman has a reputation as a shooter. And so, the coaching staff said “hey, guess what, Mike? Big opportunity for you.” Love that he shot it, hate that he was in the situation, hate the result, but that result is what you get when you ask little used freshmen to play high leverage minutes.
To sum it all up: Michael Phillips ended up being a guy who was playing college basketball a year before we originally thought he was going to, ended up putting up minutes and other associated stats that matches the “really wasn’t ready for this spot right now” motif of playing a year early, and there’s evidence, beyond the scant minutes, that he was actively not ready for the big stage. That’s how it goes sometimes.
BEST GAME
Some easy tricks to figuring out a guy’s best game of the season is “what was his high point total” or “what was his high minutes total” or “what was his best KenPom Offensive Rating” and so on. GOOD NEWS: Two of those things are the Xavier Big East tournament game for Michael Phillips. Season high in points with 10, season high ORtg of 166 thanks to 4-for-6 shooting and an effective field goal percentage of 83%, plus a rebound and an assist. It’s his high minutes total of the year in a competitive game as well, as he had previously gotten to 16 in the road loss to St. John’s and to 13 in the road losses to Creighton and UConn and the home win over Little Rock. Went out on a high note, which is nice.
SEASON GRADE
The good news is that Michael Phillips pretty easily beat out that BartTorvik.com projection for his minutes this season. Even if you turn it from “9% of 40 minutes” and just take it for the full season, he got to 17.1% of Marquette’s minutes, even with four DNP’s along the way. The bad news is that most of what we saw from him was pretty much exactly what we outlined in the Pitfalls section: He just wasn’t ready to be a contributor this season, sometimes in very noticeable ways. It feels unfair to really whack him for that given how many minutes he did end up playing, so I’m going to land at a 5 for his freshman season.
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