Marquette Basketball Moves Up To #18 In The New Associated Press Poll!

Hello! Congrats to you, the Marquette men’s basketball fan, as you now cheer for a top 20 team.

On Monday, the Associated Press released their newest weekly top 25 rankings as they always do. Your Golden Eagles are now the #18 team in the country following their home win over then-#12 Villanova last week. That’s a big jump up from last week when MU was #24 in the country.

Marquette picked up 522 points in the polling this time around. That leaves them not very far at all from #17 Michigan State with 536 points, but a long way ahead of #19 Tennessee with 377 points.

Scott Richey of the News-Gazette in Champaign, Illinois, is MU’s biggest fan amongst the voters this week, as he has them ranked #12 in the country. The Golden Eagles have at least two votes in every spots between #13 and #22 right now, and it’s actually at least four votes between #14 and #22. There is one voter who does not have Marquette ranked at all. That’s Jesse Newell of the Kansas City Star. Newell is somewhat famous for using an collection of analytical systems to create an average ranking across the systems and assembling his ballot out of that average, so it’s not like Newell’s just being a dingus and not ranking Marquette for some crazy pants reason.

The top ranked Marquette opponent in this week’s poll is actually the team that the Golden Eagles beat by 32 points. That is, of course, Providence, as the Friars have moved from #15 last week to #11 this week. Part of the reason that they’re the best team on the schedule right now is because UCLA got swept by the Arizona teams in the Pac-12 and thus dropped from #3 to #12.

Providence and UCLA are the first two teams in a five team run in the poll for Marquette. Illinois is up five sports to #13, Wisconsin is down three spots to #14, and Villanova Wildcats is down three spots to #15 after losing to the Golden Eagles. The last two teams that are on MU’s schedule and ranked this week are #24 UConn (#17 a week ago) and #25 Xavier (#21 a week ago).

Marquette returns to action for the first time in nearly a week when they visit #24 Connecticut on Tuesday night. Tip-off on that one is set for 5:30pm Central time on FS1.

You can check out the entire top 25 poll right here and you can see where each individual voter put the Golden Eagles right here.