Marquette Basketball Will Play Chicago State In 2017-18

On Thursday, we found out another game on the Marquette non-conference schedule in 2017-18. Chicago State announced their full 2017-18 schedule, and thus, we discovered that the Cougars will be coming to the BMO Harris Bradley Center on Wednesday, November 29th.

We’re now up to nine known games on the hoops schedule for this coming season. There are 3 games in the Maui Invitational, the Gavitt Games contest against Purdue, the return bout with Georgia, and the yearly tilt with Wisconsin to round out the highlights. There’s also home dates against American and Mount St. Mary’s.

Chicago State makes nine, and it is not a very encouraging addition. The Cougars have finished the season as a sub-300 KenPom team in six of the last eight seasons, and they finished at #296 in one of the other two. CSU was 6-26 this past season, finishing with a KenPom rank of #335.

Nothing against Chicago State here, but this is a bad game for Marquette. They already have an American squad that was a sub-300 team a year ago on the slate, as well as a Mount St. Mary’s team that was #209 in KenPom but has lost pretty much every notable player from that team. They might be horrible, and that means MU’s three buy games right now might all be RPI killers come March.

That’s not good, and might even be objectively bad. MU probably has a Maui mainland game yet to announce, as well as probably two more buy games. I don’t know about you, but I’m not holding out a lot of hope for any of those games to do anything but damage Marquette’s RPI even further.

(h/t @wildjays)