The Marquette Men’s Basketball Single Season Free Throws Made 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.

Since we’ve passed the first of the year, it’s officially the part of the basketball calendar where we can start looking at single season records. Thus, we’re going to be adding to those stat charts with the single season marks and top 10s that are most in danger of changing at this point.

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

A year ago, Howard shattered Wesley Matthews’ Marquette career record for free throws in a season, besting him 227 to 213. This is pretty impressive because at the time we assembled this list last season, Howard was on pace for 171 made free throws by the end of the regular season and thus come nowhere close to Matthews’ record.

Right now, Howard has 79 made free throws in 2019-20, and is averaging a career best 7.2 made free throws per game. With 18 Big East games left to be played along with one guaranteed Big East tournament game, that has Howard on track for 215 made freebies this year. That would give him the second most in program history, but still wouldn’t be enough to surpass his own record.... at least not yet. Obviously, if he’s on pace for 215, merely adding one conference tournament game and/or one NCAA tournament game should be enough to give him a brand new record high.

Howard was able to get to the line at a higher frequency during Big East play than he did during the non-conference slate last season, so there is a certain indication that he could do that again. That would also help propel him towards breaking his own record again.

No one else on the team is anywhere close to on track to getting into the top 10. Koby McEwen has the next most free throws on the team with just 43 makes so far this season. Since he’s only attempted 46 free throws this season for a 93.5% conversion rate, it would be in everyone’s best interest for McEwen to get to the line more often. However, he would need to go from his current 3.9 makes per game up to around 6.0 makes per game in order to get into the top 10.... and I’m not sure that’s really possible at this point. I’m certainly not going to turn down a bunch of 7-for-8 performances from McEwen in Big East play, but I’m also not counting on it happening, either.

Here’s how the chart stands after COVID-19 ended the 2019-20 season.