The Marquette Men’s Basketball Single Season Scoring Chart

By now, you should be more than familiar with our series of regularly updating leaderboards for various Marquette Golden Eagles sports accomplishments. Keep checking back to that link in the previous sentence for our charts as the seasons continue to churn through history and MU’s various teams continue to create new memories and accomplishments.

Here, we’re keeping an eye on where Markus Howard is on the single season scoring chart for his final season at Marquette.

In case anyone forgot, Howard just absolutely obliterated Andrew Rowsey’s record last season, surpassing his former backcourt partner just one year after he had set the record. Rowsey gathered up 716 points at the end of MU’s NIT run to pass Dwyane Wade’s 710 points, and then Howard went flying past — and this is not a joke — with 851 points.

That is bananas. In the previous 100-whatever years of the program, Marquette had seen one player score over 700 points in a season, and then 1) it happens twice in back-to-back seasons and 2) one of them is the first 800 point season in MU history. Yowzers.

As for this year? Well, after Tuesday’s game against Grambling State, Howard is averaging 25.2 points per game. That’s tied for the best scoring average in the country, by the way. With nine games played this year, Howard has totaled 227 points this season. Marquette will play two more non-conference games, plus 18 Big East regular season games, and one guaranteed Big East tournament game. That’s a guaranteed 21 games left to go this season.

At his current scoring pace, Howard figures to score another 529 points this year by the time those 21 games are over. That would put him at 756 points on the year, giving him more points than anyone else in Marquette history except for himself last season.

So then the question becomes: Can Markus Howard get to 852 points this season?

It would seem that the odds of Howard breaking his own single season scoring record will be dependent on a few factors. First, he would need to continue to average about 25 points a game. I don’t know if that will continue to lead the country, but I can tell you that’s what he averaged last season. Seems possible. Second, he will need a quality postseason run of some sort. Last year, Marquette picked up two more games than the guaranteed 21 remaining by reaching the Big East semifinals and then the NCAA tournament. With 100 points separating him from his current projection and his record set last year, it seems that MU would need something more than just those two games.

There is of course the possibility that Howard goes nuclear during Big East play again as he has during each of the past two seasons. It’s possible, of course, but we’ve already seen a 50 point performance from him this year, and I don’t know if he’s capable of multiple outings like that in a season. Since 2010-11, we’ve only seen sixteen 50+ point games in college basketball, and Howard is the only one to do it more than once.

Here’s what the chart looks like after COVID-19 ended the 2019-20 season.