Marquette Enters The Associated Press Poll At #22!

In the immortal words of John Wick: Yeah, I’m thinking Marquette men’s basketball is back.

Back in the AP top 25, that is.

On Monday, the Associated Press issued the newest and latest update to their weekly top 25 poll for college hoops, and you’d better believe that your Golden Eagles are in the top 25. They’re in at #22 in fact after beating then-#11 Villanova on the road and then-#20 Xavier at home over the past week.

Marquette snagged 177 points in the polling. That’s a bit away from #21 Xavier with 269 points, but kind of close to #23 Iowa State with 167 points.

Mark Berman is the biggest fan of the Golden Eagles, installing them as his #16 team in the country this week. Marquette picked up one vote in 17th place and two in 18th, including one from Milwaukee Journal Sentinel MU beat writer Ben Steele. There were at least four voters in every spot between that and #25 except for 21st place. 20 voters did not have Marquette in their top 25 at all this week, which seems baffling to me, or at the very least incredibly disrespectful to Villanova’s first Finneran Pavilion Big East loss since 2017.

Wisconsin is the top ranked team on Marquette’s schedule this season in the poll this week at #11, which is three spots down from last week. Villanova sits at #14, three spots down from a week ago, while Providence elevated by four spots to #17 in the new poll. Not exactly sure what about beating Georgetown by eight and Butler by seven justifies that, but that’s what happened. Connecticut are up five spots this week to #20 to kick off a run of three straight Big East teams with Xavier and Marquette right behind them. Illinois is the final ranked team on the schedule right now as they dropped from #17 to #24 for losing to Purdue in double overtime at home (not a big deal) and by 16 on the road to Maryland (definitely a big deal).

There’s only one Marquette opponent in the receiving votes department, and it’s a pretty relevant one for this week. It’s Seton Hall, who got one 25th place vote from noted Twitter weirdo Jon Rothstein. What did the Pirates do since losing to Marquette to suddenly earn a 25th place vote? Beat St. John’s at The Garden by six, that’s what. Anyway, the point of the story is that Marquette returns to action on Wednesday night against SHU and their one Rothstein-granted 25th place vote.

You can check out the entire top 25 right here as well as the full breakdown of all of Marquette’s votes right here.