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 along to an abbreviated final season in Milwaukee………
Sean Jones
Redshirt Junior — #22 — Guard — 5’10” — 185 lbs. — Columbus, Ohio
Reasonable
Expectations
We’re going to presume that Sean Jones is 100% returned to his pre-injury form at this point. Head coach Shaka Smart said more than once late in the year last season that Jones was a full participant on the scout team in practice, and there would be no reason for him to be doing that if he didn’t have a clean bill of health from the training staff. There have been videos leaking out to the internets that show Jones being able to lift off and dunk in non-competitive settings, so we have to take all of this and start with the idea that he’s totally fine to play.
Thus, our reasonable expectation here is that Sean Jones is Marquette’s starting point guard. It is not that he turns in an All-American caliber season like MU has seen from their lead guard the past three seasons, just that he’s a perfectly competent, every night, no one’s doubting him Big East-caliber starter. He starts, he plays north of 25 minutes a night, he leads the team in assists, he defends his position, he scores when MU needs it. Maybe sometimes that means he’s the scoring leader because that’s what the opponent is giving up, maybe sometimes that means he scores four points but MU wins anyway. This role going to Jones is what the Shaka Smart developmental system is supposed to do: Guy learns how to take the reins, guy takes the reins. It’s time for Sean Jones to do that.
That’s about what the BartTorvik.com algorithm projects for him. 65% of the minutes, which works out to 26 a night, 9.8 points, 2.4 rebounds, a team high 3.4 assists. If you’re saying “oh, man, 3.4 is such a low number of assists,” two things. #1: That would have been #11 in the Big East last season, just barely behind Jahmyl Telfort’s 3.42, and #2: I very clearly said that we are not expecting an All-American caliber season out of Jones. Kam Jones had 5.88 assists last year, if Sean Jones goes in that direction, things are working out pretty darn well, but we’re not reasonably expecting it.
Why You Should Get Excited
But what if Shaka Smart and Nevada Smith have milled this thing down to the point where anyone who has been in the system for a minute or two can play like an All-American? Sean Jones’ natural speed and quickness make him a different kind of point guard from Tyler Kolek and Kam Jones, and what if that opens up different kind of angles on the court, both for him to take it to the rack and also to hit the open guy in the corner for a wide open three-pointer?
What if the season on the sideline allowed Jones to mature as a thinking player in the Smart/Smith offensive system, and he’s going to be an optimized version of the player we saw for 49 games? What if he’s unlocked something about using his speed to make Marquette better than what we saw in his freshman and sophomore year. He was growing as a player as a sophomore before that growth was cut short. Can he pick up further ahead than where he left off?
There’s lots of different things that can go right for Marquette this year that leads to the Golden Eagles turning into an NCAA tournament team in March. Jones turning into That Dude is one of those things. It doesn’t have to be, it could be two or three other things while Jones just punches his time card and turns in reliable point guard minutes.
But if this works the way that Shaka Smart presumably wants it to work, to the point of outrageous delight from Marquette fans everywhere… well, I’m not going to say no to that happening.
Potential Pitfalls
Let’s go to one that you’re not expecting me to say already.
Across his career so far, according to College Basketball Reference’s math on this, Sean Jones has a career turnover rate of 17.7%. That’s on seasons of 18.5% as a freshman and 16.6% as a sophomore, and he put up that 17.7% while assembling a career assist rate of 16.7%.
Tyler Kolek’s career turnover rate at Marquette: 19.9%, which is a little artificially inflated by his bad sophomore year.
“Oh, okay, Sean’s better than Tyler!” No. I didn’t say that. You can have an turnover rate north of 18% when your assist rate is THIRTY-EIGHT POINT EIGHT PERCENT.
Jones has to find a way to be a better distributor while not turning it over more. This isn’t an option. 16.7% isn’t going to work. He doesn’t have to clear 30% like the point guard for the last three seasons — we’re not expecting to be an All-American, remember? — but he has to be better than he has been, and that can not lead to him whipping the ball all over the court.
The one you were expecting: Sean Jones can not continue to shoot under 29% from behind the three-point line. That’s his career number: 28.9%. That stinks. It’s bad. You saw what happened last year when Kam Jones and David Joplin shot 31% and 32% on threes respectively. Jones has been worse for his career. That can not continue.
If you would like some signs of optimism that it will not: Sean Jones is a career 13-for-32 (40.6%) three-point shooter in 22 Big East games, including catching fire for 6-for-12 in the last five games that we saw him play in a Marquette uniform. The offensive system is dependent on the open guy catching and shooting a three-pointer when it’s kicked out to him. If Sean Jones is going to start and play 25 to 30 minutes a night for him, the ball is going to whip around to him wide open on a regular basis. He has to be enough of a threat to make teams care about leaving him. If he’s not, Marquette needs to find a point guard option that is enough of a threat.
And finally, to put a bow on all of this: How prepared is Shaka Smart to move off of big minutes for Sean Jones if any of these pitfalls come to pass? Perhaps the better question is: How prepared is the rest of the roster to solve for Sean Isn’t Working Out if they need to do that? What if there are problems with Jones running the show, but there aren’t better options, and then: What happens to this season if that’s the case?
I am not going to take a lot of your time here.
First: We saw just 170 minutes of Sean Jones in 2025-26, and that’s not accurate, because we didn’t see Jones in 2026 at all. His ultimately season ending injury came before Marquette opened up the new year at UConn on January 4, so we only saw him play in 2025. Even then, he played just 170 minutes, a new career low, in the eight games that he played. Even then, he only played 44 minutes that we’re sure he was healthy, as head coach Shaka Smart said he picked up the shoulder injury that cost him six games in November and early December during the 100-77 loss to Indiana.
In those 44 minutes, Sean Jones shot 5-for-13 (38.5%) from the field, largely because he was just 1-for-7 (14.3%) from behind the three-point line.
In the five games after he returned from the shoulder injury — and he missed all four shots he attempted against Indiana, by the way — Jones found his three-point shot, connecting at a 8-for-20 clip (40%) and that kind of shooting would have been more than welcome had he not suffered his season ending injury. However, Jones shots just 2-for-11 inside the arc. That’s just 18.2%, and to be clear: Both makes came in the home loss to Georgetown, which meant that he shot a combined 0-for-8 against Wisconsin, Purdue, Creighton, and Seton Hall.
I ask you this: If Sean Jones doesn’t suffer the shoulder injury and force Shaka Smart’s hand into putting Nigel James into the starting lineup, at what point would Smart have pulled the trigger on making the switch on his own? Jones shot 30% on 20 two-point attempts this season and just 32% on 28 long range attempts. That’s unacceptable, really to the point where Jones did not even deserve the 20 minutes a game he was getting off the bench after the shoulder injury. When spending offseason time puzzling about where things went wrong for the Golden Eagles in 2025-26, ask yourself that question and see where that takes you.
BEST GAME
12 points on 4-for-7 shooting, two rebounds, five assists, no turnovers, two steals in 24 minutes against Southern. If I just tell you that Marquette won 100-82 over the Jaguars, you say “yeah, sure, that’s a good outing in a second game of the season buy game,” but I have to remind you that it was a six point game at halftime and MU was up just 61-52 before they unlocked what was the game-sealing run….. and that run came with Jones on the bench.
SEASON GRADE
In a way, the pair of injuries suffered by Jones has done everyone a favor here. The general sense of what we did see from Jones before the calendar turned was not particularly good, but since he wasn’t even part of the game plan from January 1st onwards, it hardly seems fair to assign him a grade for the entire season or even one for just the eight games and 170 minutes that we did see. We’re giving Sean Jones an Incomplete for 2025-26, and hopefully the transfer portal gives him a chance to have one strong final season of college basketball eligibility.
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