2012-13 Player Review: #23 Jake Thomas

With the 2012-13 season now in the books, we take a moment to look back at the performance that each member of YOUR Marquette Golden Eagles turned in this year. While we're at it, we'll also take a look back at our player previews and see how our preseason prognostications stack up with how things actually played out. We'll run through the roster in order of total minutes played (lowest to highest). Take a look at Jake Thomas' season stats while I dig up the results of a poll we did back in October...

For Thomas's Player Preview, we didn't identify any best case/worst case scenarios for him. He came in as a walk on and ended up with a scholarship for two years because Buzz had one just laying around. Depending on who you ask, there was varying amounts of expectations of what Thomas was going to contribute to the team, so it was hard to really put any kind of expectation range on what he might contribute.

What we did instead was post a poll on how many minutes Thomas would play. We set an over/under of 159.5 minutes for the season for Thomas, which would have been 5 minutes per game in every one of the 32 games that Marquette had definitely scheduled at the time. According to Marquette's official stat page, Thomas finished with 206 minutes played, so the 73% of you that took the over are officially winners.

That said, Thomas broke the 160 minute barrier just 10 games into the season. You see, we set the poll up approximately a week before Todd Mayo was declared ineligible, so that sudden shift in available players threw a bit of a monkeywrench into how this thing shook out. The game where Thomas broke the over/under mark that we had set was the last game that Mayo did not play in. It also happens to be the low point of the Marquette season, a 49-47 road loss to UW-Green Bay.

It also happens to be the low point of Jake Thomas' season, as he ended up taking Marquette's last shot in the game, a three pointer to try and win the game with three seconds left. Even more inexplicably, head coach Buzz Williams took TWO timeouts in the last 30 seconds of the game to call a play that ended up with Thomas shooting a three ball while Marquette was only down by one point.

Given all of that, can we really be surprised that Thomas only played a combined 45 minutes for the rest of the season, including 10 of those minutes in Mayo's first game? That averages out to 3.5 minutes per game in the ones that he played in, and an average of 1.8 minutes per game when spread across all of Marquette's 25 games. So, on some level, the 26% of you that took the under were still right, since you did pick that option before you knew that Mayo wouldn't be playing for a while.

And now, Thomas is transferring out, so that's about all I have to say about that.