Sandy Cohen Has Left Marquette Basketball

Just your average quiet Sunday on the ol’ interwebs, right up until Wisconsin Basketball Yearbook’s Mark Miller tossed a big rock into the placid pond.

According to Miller, junior Sandy Cohen has been granted his release from Marquette.

This is a surprising and yet unsurprising bit of news. On one hand, Cohen started 22 of the 63 games he appeared in for head coach Steve Wojciechowski over his first two seasons, including the first three games of both men’s careers in Milwaukee. On the other hand, Cohen experienced massive downturns in his minutes and overall performance as both his freshman and sophomore seasons wore on, which Wojciechowski largely attributed to confidence issues last season.

This year, Cohen has played just 19 minutes on the season without scoring on four field goal attempts, and did not play at all in Marquette’s 78-75 loss to Pittsburgh on Friday. Before the season, it seemed possible that he could end up getting lost in the playing time shuffle, and that seems to be the case.

Cohen was recruited to Marquette by Buzz Williams and signed a letter of intent with Marquette’s former coach. After a brief kerfuffle over whether or not he had been released from that letter, Cohen eventually committed to play for Wojciechowski. That decision was made fairly quickly, of course, and it’s reasonable to wonder if both men didn’t quite know what they were getting into with the other.

The biggest question in my mind is why he would leave now, or, perhaps more accurately, whether he’s completely done with college basketball. By leaving in the middle of the school year, Cohen will have to sit out til the end of the first semester wherever he end up, and he’ll be on his fourth year of eligibility there. Are there a lot of programs that are interested in taking on a senior for just one semester of playing time?

In any case, we wish Sandy Cohen the best in whatever is next for him.