Shouts to Loyal Reader MUAlways, who had a terrific summary of the 40 minutes of nightmare in Ann Arbor that we watched on Wednesday night, as YOUR Marquette Golden Eagles men’s basketball team took an 84-70 loss to #20 Michigan:
Lemme double check the stat sheet just for confirmation…. yep, that is all 100% accurate, and whatever else was going on — and we’ll talk about some of it here — that’s definitely the short version of what went wrong for Marquette here. You’re not going to win a lot of ball
games when your All-American hopeful point guard shoots 0-for-11 and commits four turnovers to end up as a -27 in just 18 minutes before the head coach nails him to the bench with 10:46 to play. You’re not going to win a lot of ball games when your scoring tilted big man goes 2-for-13, including misses on all three of his triples. You’re not going to win a lot of ball games when your $4 million transfer big man gets foul limited to 22 minutes, attempts just three shots all game, and finishes with more fouls than rebounds and the same number of turnovers as rebounds.
And yet, it is so much worse than that simplistic explanation.
With 8:56 left in the first half, Colin Porter hit a legally assisted three-pointer to put Marquette up 22-15 on the Wolverines. That was an 11-2 run by the Golden Eagles at the time. Michigan answered with 13 straight and a 20-5 run to the end of the first half that left the home team up 35-27 at the break.
See? Worse!
JP Estrella opened up the second half with a three for Michigan, and then the Wolverines answered a Damarius Owens triple with two more of their own, BOOM: 14 point margin. The problem there, of course, is that Marquette lacked a counterpunch coming out of the locker room, and now they were in massive amounts of trouble. This led to what I believe was at the Under 12 minutes timeout in the second half. I know it was before Sananda Fru hit a three for his first (and ultimately only ) bucket of the game, and that was at 9:47. During the timeout, FS1 went into the Marquette huddle and we got to see head coach Shaka Smart point out to his team that this, all of this, building a lead, looking calm and confident, and then melting down to the tune of a 42-14 run, is how they were responding to their first road game of the season, their first game against a ranked team of the season, their first game against a high major opponent of the season.
Smart did it in a very Made For TV way, extremely polite, extremely straightforward, extremely direct, everyone knew what he meant, and then he redirected that to note that all of the problems they had created for themselves now presented an opportunity to show what they were made of for the final 10 minutes of the game.
In other words: Smart asked his team if they were planning on stinking this bad all season when faced with the slightest bit of adversity, and if not, what were they going to do about it right here and right now?
And honestly: That trick nearly worked.
8-0 run to cut the margin to 14. 7-0 run to get it to just nine points with 7:14 left. Wait, is this a ball game now?
No, it wasn’t. Michigan pushed it back to 16, 69-53, on a Trey McKinney jumper with 5:18 to go, and that was probably all she wrote there. But that’s not 22, Michigan’s largest lead of the game, or a number bigger than that.
We do have to note that Colin Porter nearly dragged the team kicking and screaming into something happening down the stretch. A pair of threes and a layup from the Liberty transfer slashed the game back down to single digits, 64-73, with 2:17 to play. I swear to you, it felt like I raised an eyebrow in curiosity at this development, and then blinked, and when I opened my eyes, Michigan was up 17.
I am only slightly exaggerating. It took 51 seconds of game time.
The official final margin is 14, but hooooboy, it was almost so much worse after getting it inside of 10 with two and change to play. Honestly, that makes the whole thing even worse, because they needed four points in the final 30 seconds to make the final score look mildly not irresponsible.
Marquette is now 2-1 on the season, and more importantly, 0-1 in the six games that matter before Big East play starts.
Highlights, such as they are, courtesy of GoMarquette.com and FS1:
Up Next: It is very important that Marquette doesn’t stink on Sunday. Next up for the Golden Eagles is another game away from Fiserv Forum, but at least this one is a neutral site game with very few tickets sold. On Sunday, Marquette will be down in Chicago at the United Center for a game against Missouri. Tipoff is set for 1:30pm Central, and Peacock will have the broadcast. The Tigers are 2-1 after beating SIUE by 38 on Monday, with the loss coming in Saint Louis to Saint Louis, 90-84.
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