Marquette Golden Eagles (5-8, 0-2 Big East) vs RV Seton Hall Pirates (11-2, 1-1 Big East)
Date: Tuesday, December 30, 2025
Time: 6pm Central
Location: Fiserv Forum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Marquette Stats Leaders
Points: Chase Ross, 16.8 ppg
Rebounds: Ben Gold, 6.5 rpg
Assists: Sean Jones, 4.1 apg
Marquette Availability Note: The team announced on Sunday that Zaide Lowery is no longer on the men’s basketball roster
. Things got weird after that, but that’s a different story.Seton Hall Stats Leaders
Points: AJ Staton-McCray, 13.1 ppg
Rebounds: Stephon Payne 6.8 rpg
Assists: Adam “Budd” Clark, 5.4 apg
KenPom.com Rankings
Marquette: #114, their lowest ranking since
going into a home game against Butler at #120 on January 30, 2016, in Steve Wojciechowski’s second season in charge. Seton Hall: #49 Game Projection: Seton Hall has a 64% chance of victory, with a predicted score of 72-68.
This Season So Far: I bet if we asked Seton Hall head coach Shaheen Holloway at the time, or even now, he would tell us that he wasn’t super fired up about how his Pirates were performing in the first few games of the season. They beat Wagner by seven, they were losing at halftime to Monmouth before ending up with a 12 point win, they weren’t shooting the ball especially well, particularly on two-pointers where they were only connecting on 46% of their attempts, they were giving up an awful lot of three-point attempts.
And then they went out to Maui, threw a 13-2 run at a ranked NC State team out of the gate, then tacked onto their halftime lead with a 16-2 run after the break on their way to an 85-74 victory.
Seton Hall barely lost to USC in their Maui Invitational semifinal game, giving the Trojans an edge with a 10-0 second half run, but bounced back the next day to beat Washington State. Given the fact that Seton Hall was essentially left for dead by everyone outside of South Orange after the Pirates went 7-25 last year and then turned nearly their entire roster over, that’s an unqualified success, both for Maui and for their first eight games of the year.
Then they beat Kansas State in Manhattan, and took care of business at home against in-state rival Rutgers, and opened up Big East play with a 72-67 victory at Providence.
11-1 Seton Hall. Who woulda thunk it?
Continuing the thread: I bet if we asked Shaheen Holloway right now, he’s probably really mad at his team. Last time out, the Pirates gave up a 16-0 run to Villanova out of the locker room to trail 47-29 with 14 minutes to play. The final score was 64-56, which makes you think this was close, but it was 64-46 with 3:20 to play and the margin was still double digits with 20 seconds to go.
Tempo Free Fun: If you are going to be watching this game on television, then I need to prepare you for something.
Almost everyone who plays for Seton Hall is a transfer that wasn’t on the roster last season. Combine that with the regular refrain I hear of “Seton Hall has the smallest NIL/revenue share situation in the Big East,” and that’s a perfect situation for a TV announcing crew to draw a comparison between the Pirates and Shaka Smart’s Golden Eagles, who have nary a transfer on the roster, much less anyone who wasn’t here last season.
The two possible exceptions to the transfer thing are Najai Hines, who is a freshman big man who has missed the last two games, and Godswill Erheriene, who is a returning big man who made his season debut in the Big East opener. He played six minutes against Providence and just three against Villanova, even with Hines sidelined in both contests. The only other returning rotation guy on this Seton Hall roster is Jahseem Felton, and he’s done for the year due to injury after 42 minutes in the first three games of the season.
This game is going to come down to who can hit shots. Remember when I mentioned earlier that Seton Hall struggled to hit twos in their first few games? Yeah, so, things haven’t gotten better. The Pirates are just barely above 50% on the year, which has them ranked #223 in the country. In two Big East games, Seton Hall is shooting just 42% on two-pointers, although that’s mostly because they went 18-f0r-50 (36%) against Villanova. As a team, they don’t back that up with three-point shooting excellence, although I’d be thrilled to see the shooting percentages of AJ Staton-McCray (36%), Mike Williams (38%), or Tajuan Simpkins (46%) on the Marquette stat sheet. It’s not a secret that MU stinks at shooting inside the arc (49% overall, 44% in two Big East games), specifically at the rim since Shaka Smart and Nevada Smith preach a gospel of No Mid-Range Shots. The first team to solve their particular problem will have a massive advantage.
That advantage arrow is slightly tilting towards Seton Hall already thanks to the Pirates’ defense. Shaheen Holloway is organizing the #13 defense in the country per KenPom.com’s efficiency metric, and they get there by being elite at guarding twos and being elite at taking the ball from you. SHU is #16 in the country at defending two-pointers and #5 at defensive turnover rate. Part of the two-point defense is Stephon Payne maxing out his 6’9” frame for the 35th best block rate in the country. If Najai Hines is back in the lineup, he’s even better at swatting shots, getting to 2.5 per game in just 18 minutes a night on average. Thats 5.4 per 40 minutes, and Payne is “only” at 2.9 per 40.
On the turnover front, four Pirates rank in the top 400 in the country in steal rate per KenPom. Budd Clark and AJ Staton-McCray are both top 60 guys and in terms of regular counting stats, they average at one side or the other of two steals per game each. Villanova was able to fight off a 29% turnover rate in SHU’s last game and beat them, but that took the Wildcats splashing 44% of their three-pointers to make up for it. That’s not something Marquette can do, or at least not something that we can count on seeing from them.
Last thing: The 25-2 run by Creighton made me curious about what the rest of that game looked like, especially after Marquette was up 15-9 before that run started. It was 50-46 Marquette the rest of the way, although that’s misleading. When you’re up 34-17 with eight minutes to go before halftime, you’re going to take your foot off the gas a little bit…. and also Creighton eventually led 68-37 at one point before MU won the final 14 minutes with a score of 26-16.
But that made me curious about Marquette and backbreaking runs this season.
Marquette was up 29-20 on Georgetown before the Hoyas threw a 10-0 run at Marquette and then won the rest of the game 48-40, too.
Purdue was up 9-8 early before throwing runs of 12-0 and 12-2 at Marquette. 37-26 Boilermakers after that until MU had a late run to close the game.
Against Oklahoma, Marquette frittered away a 13 point lead, but they were up 52-44 before giving up a 13-2 run that essentially cost them the game even though it did come down to the final possession.
Against Maryland, Marquette countered a 13-2 run by the Terrapins early with an 18-3 burst of their won. The Terps blew up a second half Golden Eagles lead with a 17-3 in the middle of the half and that was pretty much that on that one.
Against Indiana, it’s easy to handwave that game as “Tucker DeVries went nuts, MU was never in it after that.” Sure, it was an 18 point game at the half. But MU scratched that down to 65-55 with just under 14 minutes to play. Then they gave up a 13-2 run and that was the end of the competitive portion of the day.
Over and over and over again this season, Marquette has gotten kicked in the face with a major run (or runs in the case of Purdue), and it’s either been too much to get back from or too late to fix. The only exception here to “run ended MU’s chances” is Dayton because MU had a chance to win that in regulation and again in overtime, and even then the Flyers answered a first half 17-1 Marquette run with a 13-2 run of their own and MU had to spend the final 20+ minutes of regulation bouncing back from that. Even then, giving up a a major run has spelled doom for the Golden Eagles. I’m not saying preventing Seton Hall from getting a 10-0 or 15-2 run is going to guarantee Marquette a win in this game, but I think it would be fun to see what the Golden Eagles can do if they don’t get kicked in the teeth for four minutes straight at one point in the game.
After all, shouldn’t the “we’re trying to stack three stops in a row eight times in this game” goal put something of a cap on giving up major runs? Isn’t that kind of the point of “get one stop, then get another, then get a third?” If I’m wrong, let me know, but that feels like it should stop the other team from having big point sprees.
Marquette Last 10 Games: 3-7, with losses in their last four games and five of the last six.
Seton Hall Last 10 Games: 8-2, but coming off a 64-56 loss to Villanova that 1) snapped a five game winning streak and 2) wasn’t nearly that close with less than four minutes to play.
All-Time Series: Marquette leads, 26-14
Current Streak: Last year’s win on Jim Chones Night at Fiserv Forum gave Marquette three straight wins in the series, as well as seven of the last eight against the Pirates.
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