The Marquette Men’s Basketball Sophomore Year Three-Pointers Made Chart

By now, you should be more than familiar with our series of regularly updating leaderboards for various Marquette Golden Eagles sports accomplishments. Keep checking back to that link in the previous sentence for our charts as the seasons continue to churn through history and MU’s various teams continue to create new memories and accomplishments.

Today we’re going to talk about the sophomore year records for made three-point baskets.

Back in 1986, the NCAA approved the three-point line for men’s basketball. That winter, Mike Flory became the first Marquette player to lead the team in three-point field goals as he connected 49 times from long range with a 44.5% conversion rate.

Just over 30 years later, Markus Howard broke the program’s sophomore season — not the program record, just the record for players in their second year of eligibility — record for three-pointers in a season by making more threes (111) that Flory attempted (110) — in the first year that any college player could officially record a three.

The sport has changed a little bit.

To be fair, Howard is the only Marquette sophomore to ever clear 100 makes in a season, much less the 110 attempts that Flory had. For a long time, it looked like no one would ever get to 90. Robb Logterman set the sophomore year record at 69 back in 1992, and he was a long, long way away from anyone, since no one between 1987 and Logterman’s second season on campus got to north of 55. His mark would stand for just three seasons until Anthony Pieper became the first MU sophomore to clear 70 when he tossed in 73 long range buckets.

Pieper’s record then nearly stood for a decade, withstanding a charge from Travis Diener during the Final Four run in 2003 before finally falling to Steve Novak the following year when The Pride of Brown Deer became the first Golden Eagle sophomore to hit 80 in a season and just barely missed becoming the first to hit 90 as well. Novak’s record lasted almost a decade and a half, all the way to 2018 when Markus Howard and Sam Hauser got into a shooting duel during their sophomore campaigns while still trailing along behind Andrew Rowsey’s charge at the single season record.

Man, 2018 was wild with what is now three of the six best three-point shooting seasons in program history all happening at once.

Anyway, Howard beat Novak that year, becoming the only Marquette sophomore to hit 100 and 110 three-pointers in a single season. That’s where the record still stands today. The top 10 only changed once since then with Justin Lewis bumping his way into the top 10 by the end of the 2021-22 season with 58 made three-pointers.

That’s a wonderful bridge to why we’re putting this together now.... because heading into the game at Seton Hall on January 20, 2023, sophomore guard Kam Jones has 56 made three-pointers this season. Yes, just two fewer than Lewis all of last season.

Jones is connecting at a clip of 2.8 triples per game right now to get to 56 through 20 games. Marquette has 11 regular season games left to go and one guaranteed Big East tournament game for a total of 12 games left for sure. That puts him on pace to end up tied with Novak for what is now the third most threes in a sophomore campaign, which is pretty good. At Marquette’s current success rate, it’s a safe bet that they’ll be in the NCAA tournament, so that’s another game, and that would make Jones the third MU sophomore to hit 90 threes in a season.

Can he get to Howard’s record? He would have to hit the same number of threes that he has already hit over however many games Marquette has remaining. Over the guaranteed 12? 4.6 per game, which drops to “only” 4.2 if you tack on that seemingly well in hand NCAA tournament berth.

Can he do that? Yeah, absolutely. Is it probably going to be easier for Kam to get to Howard’s record if Marquette stacks up a whole bunch of Big East and NCAA tournament games instead? You betcha.

Here’s the list as it stands at the end of the 2022-23 season.