With just a touch less than three hours to go before tipoff in Omaha on Saturday night, Marquette men’s basketball announced that junior guard Zaide Lowery did not travel with the team for personal reasons.
As a result of not being in Nebraska, he is obviously out for the game against Creighton.
Okay, let’s take this entirely at face value and presume that there is nothing else going on here. Best wishes to Zaide Lowery and his family with whatever might be causing these personal reasons right before the holidays.
However.
It is nearly impossible to see “personal reasons” this close to the end of the fall semester and not immediately think that something other than a family emergency is causing this. That would be the case if we did not have any compounding factors.
Compounding factors, like, say, Zaide Lowery starting the first nine games of the season, then coming off the bench for the next two games for his two lowest playing time totals of the season.
Compounding factors like, say, Zaide Lowery following up those two reserve games with not playing at all in Marquette’s 78-69 loss to Georgetown on Wednesday night.
Compounding factors like, say, head coach Shaka Smart explaining Lowery’s lack of playing time against Georgetown like this:
“It’s a coach’s decision,” Smart said. “We’re continuing to try to evaluate and figure out what the best lineups are and what guys we need to have in the game.
“From the standpoint, first and foremost, of who truly wants to pour into the other four guys with him out on the floor and be all in on Marquette. So that goes into who we play.”
Take factors like that and close the loop with “didn’t even travel to the next game for personal reasons,” and we can all draw an obvious conclusion as to what might be happening, right?
Again, I have zero information to tell you anything other than what the team’s announcement said is actually happening. I’m just saying out loud that if you are assembling a 250 piece jigsaw puzzle and build the border and start filling it in but don’t have the middle done, I can still look at it and say “oh, this puzzle is of the Mona Lisa,” without seeing the look on her face in the painting. That’s all.
What I can say for certain is that it is deeply weird and borderline silly that Marquette waited until right after the Big East mandated “3 hours before tipoff” deadline for player availability announcements and league reports to announce this to the world. Why? Because they posted about boarding their plane to Omaha at 5:09 pm Central time, nearly 24 hours earlier.
You knew he wasn’t on the bus to the airport. You knew he wasn’t getting on the plane. Just announce it. I’ll say this much: By waiting until the Big East deadline to announce it, you’re making it look much closer to Something Else than if you had announced it when the bus left the McGuire Center. Announcing “he’s not making the trip” as you’re loading the bus makes it sound like “oh, shoot, something has come up and he has to deal with that.”
What you did instead? You’re just charging up imaginations. You get that this is making you look like you’re trying to hide something as long as possible, right? We can all agree that’s what it looks like, right?
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