The Marquette Men’s Basketball All-Time Blocks 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 going to check in on the career blocks list for Marquette men’s basketball. Specifically, our interest here is where Theo John is currently sitting in the top five.

The senior big man recorded 55 blocks last season, which tied him with Amal McCaskill and Chris Otule for the 10th most in a single season. He had 70 swats in his sophomore season, which is the seventh most in any single MU season. Add all that on top of his 26 blocks in limited minutes back in 2017-18, and you get 151 career blocks for John.

That has him at #5 on the all time list after starting last season off just outside the top 10. Next up in the sights after passing Chris Otule late last season? Luke Fischer, who had 153 blocks in his three seasons at Marquette. Faisal Abraham has 172, and Amal McCaskill is sitting in the #2 spot at 175 blocks.

All of these are achievable for John in his senior season. Another 55 block season sends him to 206, which would make him just the second Marquette player to ever record 200 blocks in a career. That would be one hell of an accomplishment, and one worthy of setting his sights on.

However, that’s the best that John can hope for. Jim McIlvaine holds MU’s record for career blocks, and he has 399, just one short of that magical 400. McIlvaine was a shot blocking wizard in his four years at Marquette. He has three of the four top shot blocking seasons in program history, with his junior year 79 swats marking a career low. I’ll say it again: McIlvaine getting nine more blocks than Theo John did in his sophomore season while playing six fewer games is a career low. Mac capped his career with 142 blocks as a senior on his way to being named Great Midwest Conference Player of the Year in 1994. That made him the first ever MU player to be named conference POY (MU was an independent up until 1989, remember) and Mac is still one of just four MU players to ever get a conference POY trophy.

There is no chance that Theo John is going to record 250 blocks this season. McIlvaine’s record for blocks in a season is 142. 250 is not happening, no way, no how, and the COVID-shortened season is not helping matters either. I mean, do I want to see Theo John average 10 blocks a game as Marquette makes the Big East tournament title game and the Sweet 16? Sure! That would be totally wild and fun. But that’s the kind of thing that we might be talking about as necessary to get to 400, so we’ll just cross that off the list of possibilities.

Still, ending his career as MU’s second best shot blocker is pretty cool, so let’s get ready to cheer Theo John on as he inches closer and closer to that goal.

Here’s what the chart looks like following Marquette’s February 27th game against Connecticut.