The Wow & That Was Awful: Seton Hall 57, Marquette 51

Sunday’s Marquette Golden Eagles men’s basketball game at Seton Hall was bad.

The final score was bad, with the Golden Eagles taking a 57-51 loss.

The result was bad, as Marquette dropped to 9-12 overall on the year and 5-10 in Big East. This guarantees that the Golden Eagles can not finish better than .500 in conference play this year since it is a 20 game schedule. However, because there is still a postponed Georgetown game that has not been added back in, right now, this 10th loss means that MU can not finish better than 9-10 in the Big East and are thus guaranteed to finish under .500 for the second consecutive season.

The performance was bad, with Marquette shooting 30% from the field in the game and a positively rotten 12% behind the three-point line on 25 attempts.

The attention to details was bad, with the Golden Eagles coughing the ball up 14 times in a 70 possession game for a turnover rate of 20%. MU is already a not very good team in terms of offensive ball control, and in a game where they couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, Marquette just made their problems even worse by giving the ball away one-fifth of the time.

Marquette’s failure to actually make a push late in the game was bad, too. Seton Hall was not playing well either... or Marquette’s defense was really cranking it up.... but with both teams stinking, it’s hard to say that both teams’ defenses were both playing well. Anyway, the point of the story here is that Jared Rhodes hit two free throws with 17:58 to go in the game to put Seton Hall up 11. And then:

• Theo John got an and-1 to pull MU within four with 14:34 to go
• D.J. Carton scored on the break to pull within four with 10:56 to go
• Koby McEwen scored on the break to pull within four with 7:26 to go.
• Two free throws from D.J. Carton with 2:59 to go pulled Marquette within three.

And then they lost by six and couldn’t do any better than any of that over nearly 18 minutes.

I mean yeah, they got it within two with under a minute to go but then had to foul immediately to stop Seton Hall from just burning the clock down so that doesn’t really count.

All of this stinks.

Scoring 0.73 points per possession stinks. Scoring 0.73 points per possession after losing the two most recent games stinks. Not taking advantage of only allowing 0.81 points per possession stinks.

Everything stinks.

You wanna watch some highlights?

Up Next: Good news, it’s a road trip to Butler, and the Bulldogs are the only team that Marquette has beaten in the last seven games. The bad news is that Marquette has only won once in Indianapolis in the entire history of this series. Woo. First tip is scheduled for 5:30pm Central on Wednesday, February 17th.