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Tuesday’s big Marquette men’s basketball schedule "announcement" was the road game at Georgia that we already knew was on the board for December 4th.
#mubb faces @UGABasketball, which owns back-to-back 20-win seasons & 3-straight SEC semis. 1st matchup since 1974. pic.twitter.com/qCyo30GZ5p
— MarquetteMBB (@MarquetteMBB) July 12, 2016
Woo.
Sunday, December 4: at Georgia
2015-16 Record: 20-14, 10-8 in the SEC
Returning Points Leader: J.J. Frazier, 16.9 ppg
Returning Rebounds Leader: Yante Manten, 8.0 rpg
Returning Assists Leader: J.J. Frazier, 4.4 apg
Final 2015-16 KenPom Ranking: #70
The good news for the Bulldogs in 16-17 is that Frazier and Manten were the team leaders in those three categories last year and they’re coming back for another go-round. Manten was also the second leading scorer on the team, averaging just four-tenths of a point fewer than Frazier.
The bad news for Georgia is that even with two 16+ point scorers and a dude vacuuming up eight rebounds a game, they went 2-9 against KenPom top 50 teams. For the record, the wins were against #48 Clemson and #49 Georgia Tech. Can’t blame them for not playing #50 Florida State, because you really shouldn’t be stacking your schedule with that many ACC teams, y’know?
We’ll have to see what happens this season, but generally speaking in seven seasons under head coach Mark Fox, Georgia has been a terrible shooting basketball team. They’ve never had a top 100 eFG% ranking, topping out at #111 in his first season. They’ve been sub-200 four times, which includes being the worst shooting team in the SEC this past season as well as the 2011-12 season, where the Bulldogs were one of the 50 worst shooting teams in the country.
They make up for this by having an excellent shooting defense (top 50 five times), but they don’t force turnovers (never better than #250). As long as Marquette is making smart decisions with the ball when it comes to shots, things should probably work out okay for the boys in blue and gold.
This will be the just the second meeting between Marquette and Georgia. The first one was way back in December of 1974, with Marquette getting the 100-70 victory in Milwaukee.