Big East Announces Two Rescheduled Marquette Women’s Basketball Games

Back on New Year’s Day, Marquette Golden Eagles women’s basketball announced a pause in team activities due to a positive COVID-19 test in the program. Three games were postponed as a result. One of those, a home date with DePaul, has already been rescheduled.

On Thursday, the Big East and Marquette announced the rescheduling of the other two games.

• The January 6th game at Creighton has been moved to Monday, February 1st.
• The January 9th game at home against Villanova has been moved to Friday, February 19th.

As a result, Marquette is going to be playing games pretty rapidfire between now and that Villanova game. Somehow, the Golden Eagles are going to fit 14 games into the next 36 days. Here is the running list of off days between games for Marquette between their January 15th game against Seton Hall and their February 19th game against Villanova:

1, 2, 3, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 1

Then they’ll get four days off before going to DePaul, which I get that it’s not that much of a road trip, but still. Two days off, then at Villanova, then one day off, then at Connecticut to close out the regular season.

I get that it’s a little bit silly to rail against this kind of a schedule when Marquette was playing games on a single day’s turnaround in the Big East for years..... but that was one game every week. Friday night followed by Sunday afternoon every week still gives you Monday through Thursday as non-game days every week. Starting with a home game against Xavier on January 30th, MU starts playing every other day until February 7th. The last two games in that stretch will be Marquette’s first two encounters with Connecticut and DePaul for the year. I don’t think it’s in the league’s best interest for the #1 and #2 teams in the preseason poll to play the #3 team in the poll in a situation where the #3 team is absolutely gassed like Marquette might be.

In fact, given that the NCAA has point blank said that they only really care that you play 13 games in order to make the NCAA tournament, I’m not quite sure that a five games in nine days stretch is in the best interest of anyone involved. That’s without even getting into the discussion of traveling from Milwaukee to Omaha to Washington, D.C. and back to Milwaukee for Games #2, 3, and 4 in that run. And that’s without even mentioning that there’s still an ongoing pandemic that caused this slightly insane scheduling decision in the first place.

Anyway.

That’s how the schedule stands right now. I wouldn’t put the odds of it standing up like that for the rest of the season better than 50/50, but that’s what we have to work with.