Marquette Women’s Basketball Announces Their December Big East Games

Well, we all had fun at Media Day yesterday for women’s basketball in the Big East, didn’t we? We didn’t have as much fun as we could have, though, as the league was not ready to tell us anything about when games would actually happen. Kind of weird, sure, but such is life in the coronavirus pandemic.

ANYWAY, about 30 hours later, the Big East announced the slate of conference games for December. Is it weird that this wasn’t ready to go on Media Day when the league knew well in advance exactly when Media Day was because they’re the ones who scheduled it? Yes, yes it is.

[ahem]

Let’s move on.

The league’s press release doesn’t say anything in particular about the games other than there are 22 of them, tipoff times are coming eventually as are television assignments, and the remaining 88 games will be announced at a future date. The press release does not say that each team has four games scheduled, but I can tell you that’s the case from double checking it myself.

You’ve waited long enough, here’s Marquette’s four games:

Friday, December 4: vs Providence
Wednesday, December 16: vs St. John’s
Saturday, December 19: at Seton Hall
Tuesday, December 22: at Xavier

I’m not one to count my chickens before they’re hatched, but that certainly looks like there’s a pathway to a 4-0 start for the Golden Eagles here. You can tell, because DePaul and Connecticut are not in there at all.

I have a couple of things to point out here. First, it would appear that the travel partner schedule is now out the window. That was always the most likely option with an odd number of teams in the league now that Connecticut is back, but you can see it’s out with Marquette hosting St. John’s on December 16th and then visiting the Red Storm’s old travel partner Seton Hall three days later. There’s also the “games that are not on Fridays or Sundays” part to consider, but I thought the New York area partners was a much more obvious example.

Second, the announcement of these games is starting to confirm that the Marquette men’s team is definitely playing their games at Fiserv Forum no matter what. The game against Providence is set for Milwaukee on the same day that the men’s team is supposed to be hosting Wisconsin. Sure, there’s always the possibility that there’s a doubleheader at the McGuire Center, but we’re trying to keep as few people as possible in one of the buildings, not stack up four teams in the building at roughly the same time.

And now we go back to waiting for the non-conference schedule to be announced. Because visual aids are fun, here’s what the Marquette schedule currently looks like in terms of dates that are occupied: