The Anonymous Eagle Mailbag: In-Game Music, How To Defend Wojo, and more!

Welcome back to the AE Mailbag! We’re going to try to do these once a week between now and (at least) August, so feel free to keep firing your questions in to the email inbox — anon.eagle@gmail.com — or hit us up on Twitter — @AnonymousEagle — if you’ve got something that’s nagging at you. Marquette sports, college sports, movies, TV, favorite foods, whatever you’ve got, we’ll be happy to try to answer it.

Here we go!

From @77ncaachamps: You’re playing 1994-1998 Duke with Wojo as PG on an NCAA basketball video game. What MU player (any decade) do you put on Wojo? Why?

Well, if we’re being honest about it, regardless of how I get to assemble my Marquette roster (specific season, 4 year window, all-star team, whatever), I use Wojo to hide my weakest backcourt/guard/wing defender.

We’re talking about a guy who averaged 5.4 points per game in his 128 career games. Yeah, he shot over 36% from behind the arc, which is neat. He also only attempted three per game for his career, and maxed that out at four long range attempts per game as a senior. A heavy majority (74.9%) of his shots came from behind the arc, so it’s not like there was some kind of major trick to defending Wojo.

In terms of why it was okay to hide someone on Wojo while worrying about everyone else, Trajan Landon (14.5 ppg) was in the same recruiting class as Wojo, and Jeff Capel (12.4 ppg) was a year ahead of him. Chris Collins (16.3 ppg) had a monster senior year in Wojo’s sophomore campaign with Langdon out for the season with a knee injury, and his senior year (the only one without Capel) featured Roshown McLeod, Elton Brand, Chris Carrawell, William Avery, and Shane Battier all in front of him on the scoring chart. You had way bigger problems on defense against Duke than Wojo and his seven points per game that year.

With that said, I can practically hear him knocking on my front door shouting “LET’S GO M-EFFER, FIRST TO NINE WINS, BEST SEVEN OUT OF THIRTEEN,” while single-handedly installing a backboard on my garage (how is he knocking and installing at the same time? No idea!), so thanks for putting me at risk for that.

From @CharlieWeber45: We need a new in arena DJ. If you took the job, what songs would go into heavy rotation and what songs would get banned?

I would play nothing but Jump Around in order to completely destroy the entertainment value of the song and make it so no one wants to play it at any other sporting event ever again.

But seriously....

I am probably not the right person to ask about this. If I had my way, the in arena DJ would be banned, and all time out music duties would be handled by the Marquette pep band. Even if that’s not an option, I’m not hip to all the latest dance crazes, so I don’t know what kind of music that the kids these days would really want played at games, and that’s the most critical issue.

I really do honestly think that there needs to be more WWE entrance music played at sporting events. John Cena, Sasha Banks (specifically for women’s events), Sami Zayn, Shinsuke Nakamura, Bobby Roode, AJ Styles, Triple H (both The Game and King of Kings), Undisputed Era, and maybe even some Brock Lesnar or Samoa Joe in the right spots.

Kris Kross’ Jump should probably be played once per game as long as Greg Elliott is on the roster.

From @therealmikelach: Would you be for or against making championship blue our primary road color for mens basketball?

There’s a lot of levels to this.

At a base level, the answer is that I’m for it. Ever since the uniform switch that brought us championship blue unis, they’ve been regarded as the best of the bunch. As such, I’m on board with MU wearing the best looking uniforms when visiting other schools.

However.....

Of the current uniform design, the championship blues are, to me, MU’s third best uniforms behind the gold and, yes, the navy blue. The contrast of the gold against the navy, going in both directions for each set, makes the uniforms pop in a way that we don’t get with the championship blue or the whites, which are my least favorite of the current set.

The other part of this is that I’m not sure if the championship blues are distinct enough to be worn in another team’s barn while the hosts are still wearing traditional home whites. Maybe a situation where it’s a case by case basis? For example, the championship blues could become the official uniforms for when MU plays St. John’s and their red and white base colors.

By the way, since this is related: I don’t give a flying flip about Marquette’s win-loss records in their four uniforms. BREAKING NEWS: Marquette has a lousy record in the uniform that they hold back for only the biggest and most important games because it’s hard to beat the biggest and most important opponents with any sort of regularity. If Duke had some sort of unique uniform that they only wore against North Carolina, they’d have a record of 111-137 in those uniforms. If you tweet at the AE account about uniform win-loss records in the future, you’re getting muted forever. Sorry/not sorry.

From Mitchell in the email inbox: Is Dwayne Wade’s son Zaire going to Marquette? Is he going to be recruited?

Okay, so let’s address the first part first. He’s more than welcome if he wants to attend Marquette University to earn a degree. It’s not like he’s going to need a college degree in order to survive the rest of his life, as his father has raked in nearly $200 million in basketball paychecks over the course of his 15 year NBA career. That, combined with the endorsement money that Dwyane has earned over the years is what you can refer to as “generational wealth,” and let’s not forget that his step-mom isn’t exactly poor, either. If we’re talking purely about a situation where he’s just attending classes and earning a degree, I would really advise against attending Marquette because having people hassle you about your school basketball legend dad constantly on campus sounds super tiring.

That brings us to the second part. Zaire Wade is a Class of 2020 prospect, and attends American Heritage School in Plantation, Florida. He has a 247 Sports page, which lists him as a 6’2”, 175 pound point guard, and that’s it. No rating, no ranking, no offers. 247 has 139 players in the class of 2020 ranked right now, and the younger Wade is not one of them. They have eight players from the state of Florida in that top 139, with Justin Powell at #117 as the #8 player in the state.

From the Marquette perspective, the Golden Eagles have offered nine players a scholarship for the class of 2020 according to 247 Sports. Six of them have a national ranking, and all six are in the top 50. The other three all have Wisconsin ties. Two of the nine play point guard, the same position as listed for Wade.

I say all of this to make the following point: It would be a horrifying mistake for Steve Wojciechowski to recruit Zaire Wade if he’s not going to be a one-and-done caliber player.

Yes, guys develop at weird rates. DJ Carton was a relative nobody at the end of his sophomore year, much like Zaire Wade is right now, and now he’s a top 30 prospect in the class of 2019. Yes, Dwyane Wade himself may qualify as one of those types of players, as he wasn’t earning that much recruiting attention out of Robbins High School in 1999. It’s hard to say for certain given that he sat out a year for academic eligibility reasons, but it seems likely that more places would have been willing to take a chance on him if he had a more notable reputation at the time. The point is that maybe we turn around in June of 2019 and Zaire is a top 15 prospect. It’s possible.

He’s not right now, though, and it’s not for lack of attention. Go ahead and punch “zaire wade” into a Google search and click the videos tab. There’s piles and piles of highlight clips on the young man. It’s meant absolutely nothing for his recruiting profile. And that brings us back to the idea of recruiting him being a mistake.

He could absolutely turn into a perfectly competent Division 1 guard. Maybe he even plays at a high major program. Maybe he assembles a college career at, say, Miami, where he averages nine points, four assists, and three rebounds per game. Cool. Good for him.

I would hate to see that kid replicate Junior Cadougan’s senior year stats at Marquette.

If he were to come to Marquette as a top 150-ish recruit, maybe even top 70 like Cadougan was, and put together a quality college career, it will end up being seen as a failure by both the kid and, quite honestly, a failure by Wojo. Why? Because he’s Dwyane Wade’s kid, and goddammit, why isn’t he as good as his dad?

That’s wildly unfair to Zaire, and it’s probably going to happen no matter where he ends up playing college hoops, if he ends up playing college hoops. Making him go through that wildly unfair comparison with the double whammy of playing underneath the banner of his dad’s retired number? No thanks.