It was a pretty accepted idea that Marquette women’s basketball clearly got better across the span of Cara Consuegra’s first season in charge in Milwaukee. Sure, there was a little bit of Zero Expectations that helped that out, but the math maths out pretty good here. Through the first nine games of the season, Consuegra had the Golden Eagles playing like the #81 team in the country, according to BartTorvik.com’s data sorting, as they started out 6-3 including wrapping up that run with a road loss
against Bowling Green. After that point, MU played like the #51 team in the country. In just Big East regular season play, that ranking ticked up to #48.
It was clear that the team was playing better as the season went along. That made sense as Consuegra was reassembling a roster on the fly and figuring out how to get her players to fit together in the right ways to be the most productive team they could be. All told, Marquette finished the year with BartTorvik.com’s #30 ranked defense, and when you take that information and combine it with the knowledge that Consuegra was bringing back her entire roster for 2025-26, it was a reasonable conclusion that the Golden Eagles would be better in Year 2. After all, now they’re used to playing with each other and can just pick up right where they left off.
Right?
Record
Year 1: 21-11, 12-6 Big East (.656 & .667 winning percentages)
Year 2: 18-12, 12-8 Big East (.600 & .600 winning percentages)
Verdict: Worse
Wait one goshdarn second, what do you mean, Marquette had a worse record in Year Two? I mean, sure, obviously, going from “in the WBIT” to “not in the WBIT” tells that story, but how did they win a lower percentage of their games? Oh, wait, is this a thing where MU just played two more Big East games and lost them both and thus that’s taking away from non-conference wins type of thing? They must have been a better quality team in terms of overall efficiency, right?
Right?
BartTorvik.com Ranking
Year 1: #54, up from a starting point of #102
Year 2: #63, down from a starting point of #53
Verdict: Worse
Wait, they were worse in terms of a national comparison than they were in Year 1, AND they were worse than expected, too? And that’s after peaking at #44 right before their awful home loss to Georgetown that started off with the Hoyas on a 19-0 run? Sheesh.
Okay, well, the big flaw for Marquette in Consuegra’s first season was the offense. Obviously, with that #30 defensive ranking, there was not much to worry about over there heading into 2025-26. Consuegra went out and brought in Jordan Meulemans as a transfer to bolster the team on the offensive end of the floor, since the De Pere native drilled 42% of her three-pointers as a sophomore for Butler before she missed the 2024-25 season with a knee injury. Did the Golden Eagles fix their offense?
Offensive Efficiency
Year 1: 99.1, #100
Year 2: 103.1, #70
Verdict: Better
Hey, alright! The plan worked! I mean, I presume the plan of having Meulemans around to shoot threes helped. #70 in the country isn’t amazing, but if you’ve got a quality defense, then just a 30 spot jump in the offensive rankings can make a huge difference. Did Meulemans’ shooting help fix the team on that end of the floor?
Three-Point Shooting
Year 1: 31.2%, #175
Year 2: 35.5%, #23
Verdict: Better
HOLY CRAP, THAT’S AMAZING. Top 25 three-point shooting! Yes, please, and thank you!
Now, to be clear, Meulemans herself wasn’t that much of a fix. She didn’t just 42% again, just 33.7%, but that’s still totally fine, and it’s obviously better than MU’s team percentage so she was an additive feature. Her per-40-minutes attempt rate was a little bit down, presumably because she went from a part-time starter for Butler to a bench option for Marquette, but that’s fine.
I don’t think we can completely credit Meulemans for spacing the floor and fixing Marquette’s other shooting, though. Not entirely, at least. I don’t think “have to take Meulemans seriously” explains Halle Vice going from 27.5% to 39.6%. I don’t think it explains Olivia Porter going from 26.7% to 39.1%. I don’t think it explains Kennedi Perkins going from 19.6% to 30.8%. Those are all HUGE jumps that have to plant most of the credit with the coaching staff and the players for offseason work to improve their in-game shooting.
Slight upticks for Skylar Forbes and Lee Volker, who were already quality shooters last season and shot a little bit better? Yeah, that can be having Meulemans around, because one extra proven threat gives other proven shooters just a little bit more space to get shots off.
We can even go one step further, and Hoop Explorer tells us that Marquette was ever so slightly better on the offensive end of the floor with Meulemans out there. Not only did MU shoot threes better when she was on the court, but they shot two-pointers at the rim better, too. Just a couple of percentage points, but the point of bringing her in was to make the offense better and that happened. The defense was a touch worse with her on the floor, and we can argue about the impact of what she added on one end and took away on the other if you want, but the differential between the two is minor.
If anything, we could argue that Consuegra found herself with one of the best shooting teams in the country and then failed to make proper use of it. In Year 1, Marquette knew they weren’t good at three-pointers and didn’t take a lot, ranking #284 in the country in the ratio of three-point attempts to two-point attempts. This past season, the ratio went from 29% to 34.5%, which is obviously the sign of a team that knows that they’re pretty good at hitting threes….. but that 34.5% only ranked #169 in the country. Maybe I’m being a little bit unfair here, because raising the ratio to 36.5% is a jump to #123 in the country, so we’re talking about very small margins here.
So, uh. If the offense was better maybe exclusively because Marquette turned a weakness into a strength… then the defense must have been a huge problem, huh?
Defensive Efficiency
Year 1: 81.6, #30
Year 2: 87.0, #73
Verdict: Worse
Yeah. The thing that we spent most of Consuegra’s first season thinking “ah, yes, that’s her foundation, that’s where everything is built out from,” that fell apart on Marquette this season. The idea of “ah, well, they were already good at that and with the entire roster returning after a year of playing defense together, clearly that can carry over,” turned out to be completely wrong.
I’m not going to make a big heading for every single stat here, but the fact of the matter is that if there was a thing for Marquette to get worse at on defense, they probably did. Effective field goal percentage moved by just over a full percentage point, turnover rate dropped more than four percentage points and landed down in one of the 60 worst teams in the country, and defensive rebounding rate got more than three percentage points worse and 100 spots worse in the rankings.
There are possible explanations across the board here. Skylar Forbes missed two games. Jaidynn Mason missed a game. Olivia Porter missed the final eight games of the season and MU’s defense dropped off without her, down to #91 in the country in that eight game stretch. Kennedi Perkins missed seven games for two different injuries. Abbey Cracknell suffered an injury in Game #1, and essentially missed the rest of the season, going from 267 minutes played to just 24. While we can say “this was the same roster as the year before,” it wasn’t the same collection of players on the floor for large stretches of the season.
Even Jordan Meulemans missed three games, so whatever continuity that Marquette was building with her in the rotation went out the door for that time. There’s also the fact that MU’s defense got just a tiiiiiiny bit worse when Meulemans was on the floor according to Hoop Explorer’s calculations. The offense was miles better with her out there against top 100 opponents, so you’ll take the trade, but if we’re trying to diagnose “why was the defense noticeably worse,” then unfortunately “577 minutes went to the transfer” has to be a part of that equation.
I don’t think it’s a terrible surprise to anyone who watched Marquette let games slip away from them over and over again this past season to find out that the Golden Eagles had a better offense than defense, or that the defense was worse than it was last season. I think it’s important to point out exactly where things went wrong for the Golden Eagles, because that helps us set context for what comes next for head coach Cara Consuegra.
Because here’s the thing: Year 3 was always going to be a big change for her because of how many seniors she created on the roster when she put together her first roster with a whole bunch of juniors. It’s now turned into an even bigger change with the early departures of Skylar Forbes, Jada Bediako, and Charia Smith. We don’t have any idea what the roster is really going to look like by the time we get to November, but the negatives of Consuegra doesn’t have many players familiar with her tactics also come with the positive element of being able to reset the deck to a degree.
And now we wait to find out exactly who will be on the roster as Consuegra works toward that reset…..
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