By now, you should be more than familiar with our series of regularly updating leaderboards for various Marquette Golden Eagles sports accomplishments. Keep checking back to that link in the previous sentence for our charts as the seasons continue to churn through history and MU’s various teams continue to create new memories and accomplishments.
Here, we’re going to talk about the best free throw shooting performances amongst Marquette men’s basketball seniors.
For a loooong time, this was Dean Meminger’s
record. He got 184 free throws to fall in his senior season back in 1970-71. That was enough to pass his former teammate George Thompson, who had broken Rube Schultz’s record back in 1969 when he had 174 made shots from the charity stripe as a Marquette senior. The closest anyone came to Dream for a while was when Tony Smith had 173 free throws in 1989-90, but that wouldn’t have even been enough to break Thompson’s old record.
Meminger’s mark lasted until 2009 when Wesley Matthews became the first Marquette player to ever connect on 200 free throws as a senior. Sure, you can say “ah, yes, but there were so many more games being played then compared to Dean Meminger’s time.” However, the record stood for nearly 40 years before Matthews took it down! On top of that, he passed Meminger by 29 free throws! It’s not like he snuck past him!
There’s only been one other Marquette player to hit 200 free throws as a senior, although Jimmy Butler did pas Meminger’s number just two years after Matthews reset the record. That is, of course, Markus Howard, who finished up the 2019-20 season with 211 made free throws. That means you can’t say that Markus Howard broke every Marquette scoring and shooting record in sight. It might be spiritually true, but it’s not factually true. We also have to acknowledge the fact that the global pandemic stole two more guaranteed games from Howard, as MU was about to play in the Big East tournament and that 2020 Golden Eagles squad would have been in the NCAA tournament. I feel safe guessing that Markus Howard would have connected at least three times across two games, but he never got the chance and so he sits in second place behind Matthews.
On a long enough timeline, a Marquette senior is going to lead the Big East in free throw attempts again and thus lead in free throw makes and take a run at being not just the third senior with 200 made free throws but at breaking Matthews’ record. It might be a minute, as Shaka Smart’s system just does not tend to lend itself to drawing contact and shooting free throws. I’m not going to say no to Nigel James blowing up and getting across the finish line, though.
Here’s what the chart looks like at the end of the 2025-26 season.
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