Hi!

We’ve got another name to add to the Marquette basketball transfer possibility pile. If you’re not up to date on all the names you need to know, then scroll up to the top of the page and click on the Marquette Recruiting link. You can find everything you need right over there.

Alright, let’s dive into a highly sought after traditional sit out transfer who has heard from the Golden Eagles.

Landers Nolley II

Landers Nolley is, according to his Virginia Tech roster page, a 6’7”, 225 pound guard/forward who hails from Atlanta. His eligibility situation is slightly complicated. Nolley is a traditional transfer, meaning that he will have to sit out for a year before playing again. However, Nolley also already sat out the 2018-19 season as a redshirt season before playing in 2019-20, so he will burn a year of eligibility sitting out the 2020-21 season and then have just two years left to go after that.

For those of you doing the math on that, yes, he was recruited by Buzz Williams. Nolley ended up sitting out the 2018-19 season due to NCAA concerns about his ACT score. The concerns over that dragged on into the start of the season, and so Nolley ended up staying on the bench for the year for VaTech. Then Buzz Williams left Blacksburg for Texas A&M after all of that, and Nolley played for head coach Mike Young before now pursuing the transfer.

Yeah, it’s a lot.

Nolley made 29 starts in 32 appearances this past season for the Hokies, balancing out at 30.2 minutes per game. He averaged 15.5 points, 5.8 rebounds, and 2.4 assists per game. While he’s listed as a guard/forward on the roster page, the KenPom.com algorithm figures him out as the center on VaTech’s rotation. For the most part, that has to do with the fact that Nolley was usually the tallest player on the court for Virginia Tech this past season. 6’10” John Ojiako played 10 minutes per game, but other than that, no one over 6’6” other than Nolley was playing at all.

Needless to say, that won’t be the case if Nolley were somehow to end up picking Marquette over the 60-whatever schools who have been ringing him up. As such, it’s a little hard to take his stats from VaTech and straight away apply them to how he fits in with the Golden Eagles.

With that said, Nolley was a top 350 defensive rebounder in terms of rate according to KenPom.com, and top 500 in assist rate, too. That’s a nice combination. He was The Guy for Mike Young, racking up a top 30 usage rate. For those of you who did not enjoy watching Markus Howard put up an effective field goal percentage of 53% on a 37.4% usage rate, then you probably would really hate watching Nolley and his 44.4% eFG% at a very high usage. Nolley took 215 three-pointers this past year, and only connected on 31.6% of them. In ACC play, that shooting percentage was only 24.6%. This probably helps explain why the Hokies went 7-13 in the league after starting out 5-3. Then again, they weren’t supposed to be particularly good this season, but Marquette fans know all about what happens the first year after Buzz Williams leaves, don’t we?

Okay, so here’s the deal. Nolley was a top 70 prospect coming out of high school. He’s clearly been through a thing or two in terms of his basketball career since then, but he’s also very talented. No matter what Marquette’s roster looks like by the time he’s eligible again in 2021-22, he’d clearly be a quality addition, especially if Steve Wojciechowski doesn’t lean on him to take shots the way Mike Young did/the way Wojciechowski did with Markus Howard. If Nolley is looking for a situation where he knows there will be size on the roster to help him out in that department, then Marquette would be a good fit for him. He’s clearly going to have a wide variety of options to pick from with 60+ teams getting in touch already, so be prepared to see Nolley end up somewhere else.

Here’s what Marquette’s scholarship situation looks like at the moment. The Golden Eagles have three scholarship spots open to use immediately if Nolley were to choose Marquette. Eligibility-wise, Nolley would be joining Symir Torrence as a junior in 2021-22.