The Marquette Men’s Basketball Single Season Made Three-Pointers 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.

This time around, we’re taking a look at the best three-point shooting seasons in Marquette history.

Believe it or not, Marquette’s single season three-point field goals made record does not belong to Markus Howard. Keep that in mind if you ever hear someone say “Howard broke every MU shooting record in the book,” because it’s just not true. Now, you can easily argue that he should have broken it. Howard finished his senior season just four triples away from tying and five away from breaking Andrew Rowsey’s single season record that was established just two years earlier. However, Howard’s senior year was the 2019-20 season, and thanks to the dumbest pandemic of our lifetimes, the season was shutdown before the Big East tournament started. Would Howard have gotten four more three-pointers if Marquette had played just one Big East tournament game and qualified for the NCAA tournament as they were on track to do at that point? Seems pretty likely.

But that didn’t happen, so Howard’s final year is stuck in a tie with Steve Novak for the second most triples in a season.

As you’d kind of expect, the top 10, in fact all the way out to top 13 as we look at it now, has been heavily affected by the 2010s and the advent of understanding the value of three-point shooting. Think about it: At one point, Travis Diener had the single season record with just 90 made three-pointers, which he set in 2004 while he and Novak were dueling to see who could finish with the most that season. Novak finished with 89, which was the second most in program history to that point. It wasn’t exactly close either, as there’s currently no one from before 2004 north of 81 threes in a season.

Novak would go on to absolutely destroy Diener’s record and gain his revenge for the 2004 defeat. In 2006, the first year of the Three Amigos and Marquette’s first season in the Big East, Novak went wild and became the first Marquette player to surpass 90 three-pointers in a season....... finishing the year with 121. That’s WILD. A jump of 31 threes in a season when the record had previously been 90. Novak broke the record by more than 33%!

2018 was a big year for Marquette three-point shooting, as that season had three Golden Eagles pass Diener’s previous record. Not only did Rowsey break Novak’s mark, but Howard finished with 111 and Sam Hauser had 95. That is a lot of three-pointers.

We’re updating this for the 2022-23 season because Kam Jones is on a trajectory to enter the top 10.

The sophomore from Memphis has 31 made three-pointers through 11 games. That’s 2.8 per game. With 21 guaranteed games left on the schedule, he’s on track for another 58, and that would give him 89, one short of Diener’s old record and tied with Novak for that old consolation prize number. That’s eighth best in program history, so we’re definitely going to keep an eye on Jones the rest of the way here.

If Marquette can extend their season with some more postseason basketball past just one guaranteed Big East tournament game in March? Or if Jones starts getting on a bit of a hot streak and starts averaging three long range makes per game? Getting into the top six, passing Hauser’s 95 from 2018, is definitely in play. The way the offense is currently operating, I don’t think Jones has much of a chance to get to Howard’s mark of 111 in 2018 that is the current fifth best year in MU history. Of course, if Jones wants to start shooting 40% and draining roughly four three-pointers a game, I’m not going to tell him to stop it.

Here’s the list as it stands after Marquette’s January 28th game against DePaul.