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What Happens When You Cross The Four Factors With A Recap?

You get whatever this is going to turn into.

By Brewtown Andy
Bane gonna Bane.
Bane gonna Bane.
Jeff Hanisch-USA TODAY Sports

What is there to say about a 36 point win when Marquette went on a 18-2 run to open the game and never looked back? Not much, really. It's hard to go about a blow by blow breakdown of a game when one team never really led by less than 16. It's even harder to go about it when one team spent all but 2 minutes of the second half with a 30+ point lead.

So, we're going to talk about the Four Factors for the game here instead of making two separate posts, and then we'll hand out some awards afterwards like we normally do for our recaps.

As always, there are four main parts of a basketball game that contribute to a team's success. They are:

  • effective field goal percentage, or FG% with a bonus for made three pointers
  • turnover rate, or the % of possessions that end in a turnover
  • offensive rebound rate, or the % of possible offensive rebounds that the team grabbed
  • and free throw rate, or the ratio of free throws attempted to field goals attempted expressed as a percentage

We'll look at the numbers for Marquette and their opponent in both categories for each game. The opponent number doubles as Marquette's defensive numbers, since it's what they're allowing. Along side each of the individual game numbers, you'll see two numbers after that labelled "Season." The first number is Marquette's either offensive or defensive totals for the year, the second is Marquette's national rankings in those statistics. Both season long numbers are provided by KenPom.com.

Effective Field Goal Percentage (eFG%)

Marquette: 70.2% (Season: 48.4%, #200)
IUPUI: 33.6% (Season: 43.7%, #25)

WOAH, NELLIE, as Keith Jackson would say. Here's what makes the shooting performance by Marquette impressive: they hit on five of their first six three point attempts, and after Todd Mayo hit the fifth to make it 21-5, MU would only shoot three more the rest of the game. They built their lead on hot shooting to start, and once they had it, they ignored it and focused on getting the best shot that they could, and they found a lot of great shots. Marquette shot 64.6% on two point field goals for the game.

I didn't even get around to talking about the defensive end there, although it may not have been all Marquette's doing that caused IUPUI to have a rough go of it.

Turnover Rate (TO%)

Marquette: 23.1% (Season: 18.0%, #153)
IUPUI: 16.1% (Season: 18.1%, #191)

I can deal with a dip on the defensive side, as Marquette went up big early and didn't need to pressure IUPUI very much in order to keep the game in hand. But the offensive side is the exact opposite of that. When you have a big lead, there's no reason why you can't be better than normal at holding on to the ball, but instead, MU was coughing up the ball nearly one out of four trips down the floor. Even worse, nine of the team's 16 turnovers came in the second half, where they were up 30 almost the entire time. A little bit of inexperienced players getting a long run out there? Maybe. Every active player except Dylan Flood got somewhere between eight and 11 minutes.

Offensive Rebounding Rate (OR%)

Marquette: 43.5% (Season: 39.0%, #23)
IUPUI: 21.7% (Season: 29.2%, #86)

Hitting a vast majority of your shots is how you beat a team. Grabbing more than 40% of what few shots that you miss for a second chance at things is how you go about demoralizing them. Only allowing them to get to 20% of the vast number of their own misses is how you go about ending the game quickly.

Free Throw Rate (FTR)

Marquette: 22.8% (Season: 43.1%, #130)
IUPUI: 21.3% (Season: 34.7%, #76)

Keeping your already low defensive FTR down by not fouling shooters when you're already obliterating a team is outstanding. But when you literally stop shooting three pointers for the last 17 minutes of the game, only getting 23% as many free throws attempts as field goal attempts is really bad. Maybe a part of it is IUPUI not fouling because 1) they're trying to get the game over with and 2) they're actually good at not fouling (35.5%, 88th best defensive FTR in the country), but when you're shooting so many shots inside the arc and making so many, you'd think that the defense would like to start fouling a bit to stop you.

Jae Crowder Player of the Game: 16 points on 7-10 shooting, seven rebounds, six assists, one block, and only one personal foul. DO IT AGAIN, JAMIL WILSON. Honorable mention to Davante Gardner for his 20 point, 10 rebound double-double.

Joe Fulce Undersung Eagle of the Game: Does publicly declaring that you want to be a glue guy make you more or less likely to be the Undersung Eagle?

11 points, including 3-4 behind the arc, four rebounds, five assists, and five steals in this one locks this up for Juan Anderson.

Davante "Big Smooth" Gardner Smooth Play of the Game: The easy option is the coast to coast jam by Deonte Burton, which again, this is why you watch 30 point blowouts. In fact, let's watch it again:


But I'm actually going to go with Jajuan Johnson's reverse layup late in the game, because it was almost the most unsmooth move of the game. TreyJay got free for a dunk, but as he went up, he lost his handle. While in mid-air, he recovered control of the ball, realized where he was, and still managed the reverse layup. Nicely done, sir.

Next Up: Tomorrow night, Ball State comes to the Bradley Center. They're officially 2-5, but one of the wins was against "Taylor," which I presume was not just Steve Taylor, Jr., out there by himself.

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