#7 Oregon State Rallies To Defeat Marquette Women's Basketball

They should have won the game.

Through 20 minutes on Thursday night, Marquette had provoked 14 turnovers from Oregon State, limited the Beavers' two prolific three-point shooters to a combined mark of 1-5 on long range attempts, and staked themselves to a 30-25 lead against the #7 team in the country.

After another three minutes and 22 seconds, Sydney Wiese and Jamie Weisner had missed three more long balls and Allazia Blockton had pushed the lead to 10 points for Marquette.  The very next thing to happen?  Oregon State's 15th turnover of the game.

16:23 to play and a very young Marquette team was on the verge of cracking open a game against the favorites to win the Pac 12 this season.

Marquette scored just twice more in the third quarter: a tip in from Erika Davenport and the front end of two free throws from Amani Wilborn.  At the end of three periods, Oregon State was up by three.  Marquette would tie the game at 52-all with 6:12 to play, but OSU scored the next seven points and that was all she wrote for MU's chances at the biggest win in Carolyn Kieger's still short tenure as head coach.

They should have won the game.

Jamie Wiesner was shooting 60% on threes coming into this game, and she went 0-7 behind the arc.  Sydney Wiese is Oregon State's all time leader in three pointers made, and she was hitting threes at a 48% clip coming in this season, and she went 1-4.  This is exactly what they had to do to win the game.

Unfortunately for Marquette, last year's Pac 12 Player of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year is still wearing an orange and black uniform, and Ruth Hamblin proved why she deserves the All-American attention this season.  17 points on 6-13 shooting, 17 rebounds, including nine on the offensive glass, and seven blocks, and Hamblin was the clear MVP of this game.

Those 14 first half turnovers are what kept Marquette in the game, and they were never going to sustain that rate.  The Golden Eagles ended up shooting just 30.3% from the floor in the game, and they were worse than that in the second half when they absolutely could not afford to go colder than they already were.  Only four MU players made more than one basket in the game, and even of those players, it was only Blockton that you could say had a good night, going 10-21.

With the loss, Marquette falls to 2-5 on the season.

Up Next: We get an early start to Badger Hate Week as the Badgers come to the Al McGuire Center on Sunday afternoon.  Tipoff is at 2pm, and Wisconsin comes in with a record of 3-3 after a road win over Wake Forest in their most recent outing.