Marquette Has Relieved Steve Wojciechowski Of His Duties As Head Men’s Basketball Coach

Shouts to Stadium’s Jeff Goodman who beat the official press release by a few minutes, but at 12:37pm Central time on Friday, March 19, 2021, Marquette Vice President and Director of Athletics Bill Scholl announced that Steve Wojciechowski was no longer the head coach of the MU men’s basketball team.

Here’s the quote from the press release from Scholl, which you can also see in the tweet:

“After a thorough evaluation of our program over the last week, which included multiple conversations with Steve, I concluded that now is the right time for a new leader of our storied program,” said Scholl. “I’m confident that our history of success and our commitment to developing young men who are leaders on and off the court will attract the highest caliber of coaching talent. I want to thank Steve for his dedication to our student-athletes, and for how he represented our men’s basketball program and the university. We wish Steve, Lindsay, Jack and Charlie nothing but the best in the future.”

The Marquette job was Wojciechowski’s first head coaching job after serving as a long time assistant coach at Duke, his alma mater, to college basketball coaching legend Mike Krzyzewski. After being hired in the spring of 2014, Wojciechowski compiled a record of 128-95 in his seven seasons in charge along with a mark of 59-68 in Big East conference play. He led the Golden Eagles to the NCAA tournament just twice, in 2017 and 2019. They were projected to reach the NCAA tournament a third time in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic cancelled the tournament before the bracket was announced. In 2020-21, Wojciechowski endured his second losing season as Marquette head coach, going 13-14 with a 8-11 record in Big East play. That was the fourth time in his seven year tenure that Marquette finished under .500 in conference action and the fifth time that he failed to deliver a winning record against Big East foes.

In short, it was an underwhelming seven seasons. If you want the long version, you can read this article published [checks watch] 26.5 hours before this news broke. That’s probably a coincidence.

This news is a surprise, to say the least. Marquette’s season clearly came to an end last week Wednesday with a very awful looking loss to Georgetown in the first round of the Big East tournament that snapped MU’s perfect record of always reaching the Big East quarterfinals. Quite soon after that, the coaching staff was reaching out to possible transfer candidates. After that, we got through Bloody Monday, when multiple high major Division 1 head coaches were let go on the first day after the NCAA tournament bracket was announced. We got all the way til Friday before Marquette made an announcement. It seemed like nothing was going to happen, which itself was not surprising considering the current financial stresses facing Marquette as an institution if not just an athletic department. However, there is this line in the press release: “The transition costs and obligations related to the change in coaching leadership will be paid for entirely by Intercollegiate Athletics.” That’s not Indiana’s “philanthropic” solution to removing Archie Miller, but it’s at least in the same direction.

While this will be the end of this article, it is not the end of the story. We can go ahead and presume that there will be some kind of roster movement, either current players electing to leave via transfer or recruits electing to request their release or merely re-opening their recruiting. We’re most likely nowhere near even having coaching candidate rumors pop up, but those are coming as well. Anonymous Eagle will keep you as up to date as possible, so keep your browser pointed in our direction.

I do have a request, though: If we could all do whatever possible to avoid another #DoneDeal, that would be great.