:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/47002810/20150721_MB_836_MB.0.0.jpg)
PROS:
- Marquette won, and won insanely easily after a fairly tight first quarter and a half.
- All three walk ons managed to get into the game, and two of them scored.
- Regardless of the score, Marquette PUSHED to get the ball up the floor. If there was an emphasis on this just for the European trip and the 24 second clock that they used in each game, well, then that's that. But if that's going to be the aim for the team for the season.....
- No one got hurt.
- Even with what was obviously an elevated pace of play as evidenced by MU scoring an average of 3.3 points per minute, it was still the second lowest amount of points given up out of the four games. I'm not going to rewatch a game with a nearly 60 point margin of victory just to figure out points per possession (what's with no box scores, MU?), but I'm pretty impressed with that effort.
- The game got so out of control that Thomas Bilde, the Marquette fan's new favorite play-by-play announcer, started calling the game in his native Danish just to entertain himself.
CONS:
- There wasn't really any point in watching the game after halftime, as it had already stopped being competitive.
- Even bothering to repeat any statistics from this game is completely counter-intuitive to the idea of trying to figure out what Marquette is going to look like come November 13th when Belmont is on the other side of the Bradley Center. I don't want to hear anything about double-doubles or near triple-doubles, or triple nickels. Just forget about all of it.
- This tweet. Intentional hyperbole just as a joke? Maybe. In fact, I'd go so far as to say likely. But I'm not any more or less likely to pick Marquette to win or lose a game this season based on anything that I saw during these four games. What we saw over the last week was Marquette playing professional teams that are roughly sub-sub-D League caliber, maybe/probably even worse. Let's remember that Sam Basket Massagno employed MU's very own Jake Thomas last season and promptly went 4-17.