We Have An Update For Marquette In The Basketball Tournament

On Friday, we learned that Golden Eagles, the Marquette alumni team, will be back in The Basketball Tournament in 2019.

However, that’s really all that we knew, and the lack of a team page for the MU guys didn’t help provide clarification at all, either.

That got cleaned up on Monday, as someone (I presume general manager Dan Fitzgerald?) took to the Twitter Machine to announce that the team page was officially up and running on TheTournament.com.

That was relatively quickly followed with a Twitter update from TBT itself. We don’t need to worry about voting for Golden Eagles this year. Thanks to their progression to the semifinals in 2018, Golden Eagles is officially locked in to the 2019 field. All they have to do is have seven players officially registered to play on the website by June 1st, so it’s all in Dan Fitzgerald’s hands now. I feel it’s safe to say that they have at least seven players committed to play, and it’s just a matter of progressing through the official registration process right now.

While we don’t need to vote for Golden Eagles this year to put them into the field, it would definitely be a worthwhile endeavor to do so. Seven players is the minimum needed, but the roster can be as large as nine without paying TBT to get to that number. If 1,000 people vote their support for a particular team, that team gets the ability to add a 10th player to the roster.

As I type this on Wednesday morning, Golden Eagles is sitting at 80 supporters. I feel like we can round up 920 more Marquette fans in the next three-ish weeks, just in case.

One other thing to note: Golden Eagles is officially without a regional home at the moment. Yes, yes, if you look at the team page it lists “Wichita Regional” as their designation. TBT officially confirmed to AE on Tuesday night that the Wichita notation is merely a placeholder for the time being.

This is relatively important, as each team that advances out of the eight regional sites gets a cut of the ticket sales. As of Tuesday morning, the ticket sales prize for the regional winner in Wichita — and I’m not kidding here — is over $47,000.

Syracuse is up over $10,000, and those are the only two regionals up into the five digits already. It’s not particularly surprising that the tickets aren’t selling like hotcakes elsewhere right now. There’s only the home team known for most of the regions at the moment, and with eight teams heading to each place, you can understand why people aren’t buying tickets without knowing who exactly they’re going to be seeing.

I will admit, I’m kind of surprised that the Richmond regional isn’t doing very well, given that VCU seemed to be very supportive of Ram Nation in the past tournaments. Oh well, there’s still a lot of time left to go before mid-July when the games take place.

TBT alluded to news coming soon as to where Golden Eagles would officially be playing, so keep your eyes open for that. We’ll update y’all with exactly where and when the games will be when it’s official so y’all can go buy tickets and add to the pile of money that the squad will be aiming to earn.

Don’t forget to head over to the team page in the meantime, and support Golden Eagles so they can add a 10th player to the team. If they win the $2 million winner-take-all prize, you could earn a cut of the winnings if you play your cards right!