Marquette Alumni Seeded #1 In 2019 The Basketball Tournament Wichita Regional

The Basketball Tournament released the bracket for the 2019 iteration of the summer event on Tuesday afternoon, and it was nothing but good news for Marquette fans.

Golden Eagles, the squad of Marquette alumni (and friends) are seeded as the #1 team in the Wichita regional of TBT in 2019. They’ll play #8 seed Fort Hood Wounded Warriors in the first round. That game will take place at 6pm Central on Friday, July 26th at Charles Koch Arena in Wichita, Kansas. The game will be streamed live on ESPN3/WatchESPN.

TheTournament.com

Here’s the Fort Hood Wounded Warriors team page explanation as to their entire deal, in the words of team general manager Ced Brooks:

My team is made up of childhood friends. Some of us are now pro basketball players and the rest are retired military. All of us are affiliated with the armed forces one way or another, whether our parents are retired vets or my players are ex military themselves. We are a family. One of our mottos is “One Team One Family”. This is our way of giving back to the Wounded Warrior Project because we have seen our families go through the good and bad of the armed forces.

Well, that’s cool.

The winner of the GE/FHWW game will advance to play the winner of #4 Team Colorado and #4 Purple and Black the very next afternoon, Saturday, July 27th. Both of those teams are college alumni squads (Colorado and Kansas State, respectively), so they’ll be pretty solid tests for the Golden Eagles squad, presuming the MU guys get through.

The other side of the Wichita bracket is pretty strong. You’ve got AfterShocks, aka the home team aka the Wichita State alumni team and Self Made, the Kansas alumni team, as the #3 and #2 seeds respectively. Sideline Cancer has a few familiar names to college basketball fans in Remy Abell, Maurice Creek, and Marcus Keene. Iowa United is a team of Iowa, Iowa State, and Drake alumni, and there’s some names in there that you’d recognize. However, they might get a lot of attention if they keep advancing, as Iowa United features Megan Gustafson. Gustafson was the 2018 AND 2019 Big Ten Women’s Basketball Player of The Year as well as the #17 pick in the 2019 WNBA Draft. Dallas released her before the season started, though, and now the Wisconsin native (shoutout to Port Wing) is the first ever active professional woman’s basketball player to participate in TBT.

The Wichita regional is particularly beneficial to Marquette, at least right now. In a new twist to TBT, each of the eight regional winners will advance to Championship Weekend in Chicago...... as well as take home 25% of the ticket sales at their regional site. As of this writing on the afternoon of June 11th, the Wichita site is the most profitable site at [drumroll] $51,253 to the champ. Yeah, that has to be split various ways amongst the team, but that’s also not chump change, either. Only Syracuse ($13,590) and Columbus ($2,578) have cleared the $1,000 minimum guarantee from TBT, but I’d imagine that those purses will all start jumping up now that all of the regions have been announced.

We do have two new additions to the Golden Eagles roster since the last time we checked in. Elgin Cook and Mo Charlo are on the roster page right now. Cook was part of the MU team a year ago, and proved himself to be a valuable sidekick to the lightning hot Jamil Wilson. Charlo played for two years at Nevada from 2004-2006, averaging 9.8 points, 4.4 rebounds, and 2.2 assists in 65 appearances. He’s been playing professionally all over the place ever since, including 235 games in the G-League, where he was an all-star and All-Defensive First Team in 2014. The 6’7”, 210 pound Charlo has G-League career averages of 10.6 points, 6.0 rebounds, and 2.2 assists.

If you’re interested in buying tickets to see Golden Eagles in Wichita, head right over here.

You can check out the entire 2019 TBT bracket right here.