The 2025-26 college basketball season is right around the corner, so let’s dive into the Marquette men’s basketball roster and take a look at what to expect from each player this season. Going forward in these Player Previews, we’ll be going in this order: The four true freshmen expected to play this season going in alphabetical order by last name — skipping past Sheek Pearson who is projected to redshirt — then moving on to the redshirt freshman, then the redshirt junior who missed last year, and then going through
the returning players in ascending order of total minutes played in 2024-25.
We’re going to organize our thoughts about the upcoming season as it relates to each player into categories, as we always do:
- Reasonable Expectations
- Why You Should Get Excited
- Potential Pitfalls
With that out of the way, we wrap up our Player Preview series here with a look at a senior guard that hasn’t quite had the breakout that anyone has hoped to see from him in his career……
Chase Ross
Senior — #2 — Guard — 6’5” — 210 lbs. — Dallas, Texas
We’ve yet to see a full blown Chase Ross takeoff at Marquette.
He had a nice/surprising freshman year, averaging 4.6 points and just under two rebounds in 16 minutes a night that season, and pretty much the universal reaction around that “ah, I see the growth trajectory, he’s going to be pretty good.” Sophomore year, he was a big time bench option for a team that earned a second straight #2 seed in the NCAA tournament, but ultimately, his per-40 minutes numbers were about the same as freshman year. Part of that might be because he was clearly not the same player after a mid-season shoulder injury that cost him six games, but the facts are the facts as to what Ross was providing the team.
Ross elevated to the starting lineup last season, and once again, everyone thought, “ah, yes, here we go, Chase Ross time.” And for a little while, everyone was right about it…. and then Ross suffered a hand injury that ultimately needed post-season surgery, and he was about 90% of what he was before that point of the year. It ended up as not quite The Leap that we thought we might see from Ross, as his stat bumps are mostly just in line with getting a nine minute bump in playing time. The real bummer there is that Marquette really needed another scorer last season, someone to make things just ever so slightly easier for Kam Jones and David Joplin as their three-point shooting went in the tank….. and Ross just didn’t elevate to that level.
Now he’s back, the elder statesman of the backcourt and one of two seniors that we’re expecting to say farewell to in the spring. Are we going to get Chase Ross: Obvious All-Big East Guy, as his preseason all-conference honors suggest, or are we going to get Chase Ross: Totally Competent High Major Starter again?
Reasonable Expectations
I hate doing this to anyone, but we have to start at the level of “Chase Ross has to to do more than last year if Marquette’s going to have an obviously successful season.” He’s probably not going to play more than the 30 minutes per game he averaged in 2024-25, so he’s just going to have to cram more into those 30 minutes. That’s going to mean attempting more than 7.4 field goals per game, which was a career high. The good news? That was just 9.7 per 40 minutes, and that was only 0.7 higher than his career best there, which he set in his freshman season. It’s going to be easy for him to take shots at a higher rate this season, given the vacuum of obvious scoring threats on this roster.
The more is going to have to be across the board, so: More than 10.5 points, more than 3.8 rebounds (although that one might not need to be too much more), more than 2.1 assists (again, maybe not too much more). Asking a guy who was #107 in steal rate in each of the past two seasons to find a way to get more than 1.8 steals is probably a little past the edge of what’s reasonable.
BartTorvik.com’s projection algorithm seems to be on our side here: 14.1 points, 4.2 rebounds, 2.3 assists in 32 minutes per game. It’s not A LOT more, just more than last year. It’s also showing Ross projected at a career high usage rate — sure, that’s what taking more shots is called — but the computer shows him coming a little bit down from a career best offensive rating and ultimately landing on the same PORPAGATU! which is essentially “efficiency at that usage.” This is all fine, I think.
Why You Should Get Excited
The Big East coaches voted Chase Ross as one of the seven best players in the Big East going into this season. If that holds until they vote again in March, then this will have been a good season for Marquette. In short, you should be excited for great things from Chase Ross because great things for Chase Ross means everyone else is going to have an easier time contributing. Great Chase Ross has a gravity well that shifts defenses away from his teammates, and that means more open threes for Ben Gold and Zaide Lowery, it means more cuts to the rim for Lowery and Sean Jones, and so on and so forth.
Let’s go one step further.
If Ross is clearly one of the best players in the league when we get to March, as defined as “obvious All-Big East First Team pick,” then we are not that far from asking exactly how close can Chase Ross get to Big East Player of the Year attention?
Think about it: What if Ross is clearly Marquette’s best player and Marquette is clearly outplaying their preseason poll spot of fifth in the Big East, say easily in the top three? Ross has to at least be in the conversation at that point, and if something slides sideways with both Creighton (no Ryan Kalkbrenner on defense) and Providence (Kim English still coaching), it’s going to be pretty easy to get the Golden Eagles into that position, especially if Chase Ross is doing better than the stat line we laid out in the Expectations section.
Potential Pitfalls
I have written 12 Player Previews for this season, this is #13. All 12 of them, I had logical, thought out reasons as to why things miiiiight not quite work out for the best for each of the guys on Marquette’s roster this season. They were all on-court reasons, whether that was maybe their role doesn’t come together or there’s just not minutes for them or something else.
I didn’t mention one particular thing about any of the other guys on the roster, even though there’s something looming as a possibility for all of them. Mentioning that thing would be jinxing them, and that’s mean and uncalled for.
But with Chase Ross, the fact of the matter is that we can not assess his career to this point without discussing the fact that he spent the back half of each of the past two seasons nursing notable injuries. As such: We have to raise the possibility that something is going to ding Ross out of his best possible version yet again this year. We’re all thinking it! I’m not being jinxy here! I mentioned the injuries up at the top! It’s a thing that we have to worry about with Ross!
Also there’s the “what if he’s not an A-1 top line player” thing. With as many questions as Marquette has going into this season, Chase Ross not ringing the bell on a step forward — not a leap, just a step — would exacerbate pretty much every single other question facing the Golden Eagles.
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