Marquette vs St. John’s Gets A Tip-Off Time

On Wednesday night, and I do absolutely mean NIGHT, the Marquette athletic department slipped a notification about the start time for an upcoming game out onto the Twitter machine.

Before we get into the actual information here: Why was this announced at 10:17pm Central time on a Wednesday night? What exactly about this could not have waited until 12 hours later when, y’know, people would see it? Even more to my point: There is not a press release on this information on either GoMarquette.com or BigEast.com as I type this on Thursday morning. I get that MU was informed of when the game was going to be so they just immediately threw it out there, but why not wait for the official press release (which I presume is coming on Thursday morning?) that has the start times for all five games on March 5th?

Anyway, so, Marquette’s final regular season game of the 2021-22 season will be against St. John’s, but we knew that. The start time will be 8pm Central, and the broadcast will be on FS1. We didn’t know either of the last two pieces of information until just now, and that’s actually really smart by both the Big East and Fox Sports. They intentionally waited as long as they possibly could justify waiting to see what the league standings were shaping into, and then decided on what game would go where for the biggest possible audience for the game that was expected to have the biggest impact on the final standings for the conference tournament.

I’d like to tell you what decision they made, but I’m looking at the official schedule right now, and it’s still a bunch of TBA. If I had to guess, the Villanova at Butler game is the most likely target for the primary window. With Providence as the only one of the 11 league members not in action on March 5th, it makes sense to slot the only other team with a shot at the league title at this point into the best possible audience spot.

Anyway, it is nice to get a Saturday night start time that everyone can [loud coughing noise] prepare for ahead of time. Should be a [loud coughing noise] fun atmosphere at Fiserv.