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 Oso Ighodaro and what he’s going to do with the 2023-24 season.

No, he’s not going to break Jim McIlvaine’s career record of 399 rejections. In fact, it’s possible that no one’s ever going to do that. It’s going to take four seasons of averaging 100 blocks to get it done. Theo John couldn’t even get to 200 but still passed everyone else in program history by more than 30 swats.

Last year, Ighodaro ended up with 54 blocks, which left him just one stuff short of a tie for the 11th most blocks in any Marquette season and four away from the 10th most. That brings him up to 84 for his career after three seasons.

This coming season, we can expect Ighodaro to play roughly the same role for the Golden Eagles in terms of starting and average minutes played. As such, it wouldn’t be wild to think that he can get at least another 50 blocks under his belt. 20 would get him into the program’s all-time top 10. 50 would be good enough to push him past Michael Wilson for the seventh most blocks in any Marquette career, or at least any career since the NCAA made blocks an official stat.

Can Ighodaro get further past that? That might be asking a lot. He’s going to need 62 to catch and pass Chris Otule for the sixth most blocks in a career. That’s just barely under two per game in the 32 guaranteed games that MU has scheduled this season. If you think MU has the ability to get back to the Big East title game and the Sweet 16, that’s still 1.7 blocks per game after averaging 1.5 a year ago. Passing Luke Fischer for fifth would mean another 70 blocks, and you can do some rough math in your head for what we’re talking about here.

It’s not impossible. We just watched Kur Kuath rack up 81 blocks a couple of year ago, and he played fewer minutes than we’re expecting to see from Ighodaro this season. The catch, of course, is that MU also wasn’t depending on Kuath to play 30 minutes a game that year because — SURPRISE — Ighodaro was backing him up.

Here’s what the chart looks like after Marquette’s game against #2 Purdue.