My how much two home games can change things. At this point last week, I was still reading messages and mentions about how Marquette’s offense had been figured out and this team wasn’t as elite at predicted. To the point where I had to get off my butt and tell peeps to chill.
Two home beatdowns of Texas and Notre Dame later, and a little bit of sanity has been restored. But one thing that lingered throughout is that this team isn’t just very good, like last season’s, it’s legitimately within the realm of national title contenders. And it wasn’t the 2 games or gaudy record speaking, either. The underlying metrics, which is why I didn’t break a sweat after the UW loss, were shouting Marquette’s prowess this whole season.
Behind the Boxscore
One very cool feature about Bart Torvik is that you can remove preseason weights and see exactly what the advanced metrics are saying about your team, even if the samples are too small to not take the results with a grain of salt. I used it last season to point out that despite similar records the 2023 team was significantly ahead of where the 2022 team stood.
So I wanted to do something similar this season to expand on my initial point. Despite the 2 losses, this 2024 Marquette team is miles ahead of where any previous MU team of the past 5 seasons stood.
For those unfamiliar, Barthag is TRank’s version of Pythag, which is a formula using Adjusted Offense and Adjusted Defense to estimate of what a team’s chance of winning would be against the average DI team.
In Bart’s terms, “So it is between 0 and 1, and higher is better.”
The reason I call out the Barthag is because even though at the end of the day all that matters is the wins and losses, how those wins and losses happen means a ton to predicting if there will be more wins or not. For example, check out how nuts that 2022 number is.
Despite being 8-3, with wins over Illinois, West Virginia and Kansas State, the underlying metrics were telling a story of a team that was living above its means. The results were much better than the quality of play would suggest. (And that usually happens when you only win close games and lose in blowouts, like had happened to that point, with losses by 16, 13 and 11.) It should have come as little surprise that Marquette would go on to lose their next 3 games.
I’d also like to direct your attention to the 2019 number. I wrote a whole thing that season about why the computer metrics were so much worse than the AP ranks. But we don’t have to go back and pick at that scab right this moment.
In general what I want to call out is that Marquette this season has everything you could want in a national title contender from a numbers perspective. Elite offense. Elite defense. Great record. Excellent strength of schedule. This is a team unlike any we’ve seen at Marquette in decades.
G-Scores
Another feature on Torvik is the Game Score number, which gives you a single game Barthag and gives you a physical number of how well a team played regardless of result.
Through 10 games, 8 of Marquette’s G-Scores have landed above 90, and 6 over 95.
What this tells us is that Marquette has been consistently in the elite class of performance. Now look at the same timeframe in the 2022 season.
Looking at Marquette’s history since the 2008 season, no team had ever posted more than 5 game scores of 95 in a the nonconference portion of the season, so the current 6 are something no Marquette fan has seen in the last 16 seasons.
Again, this isn’t to say Marquette is guaranteed to do anything, but with a team that had so many returning minutes, you’d expect there to be a lower ramp-up time until peak performance was reached. So this is doing just that.
But what this tell us, is that Marquette is handling its cupcakes (and overmatched non-cupcakes) with aplomb. Winning ugly will still be a requirement, but when a team has shown this much consistency across 1/3rd of its schedule, it’s time to take notice.
Elite Trio
While I meant for this to be a quick look under the hood at team performance, I do have to call out what Marquette’s trio of Tyler Kolek, Oso Ighodaro and Kam Jones have been doing. They had enormous expectations levied on them going into the season and have somehow blown them away against an incredibly difficult schedule.
All three have ORatings over 120 on increased usage, compared to last season.
This trio has logged just under 350 non-garbage possessions on the floor together, and per Hoop-Explorer, Marquette has an Adjusted Net Rating of 36.7 when they share the court. That number was only 30.4 last season, too. They instill so much confidence not just in fans, but also in the teammates around them.
But outside of stats or fancy numbers, watching these 3 play brings so much joy.
Kam is constantly hamming it up in the background of any shot.
Oso is holding down the fort, both before and during the game. This team’s rock.
Kolek is the mouthpiece and the face, always injecting (usually crude) humor and backing every bit of it up with his on court play.
I can’t get enough of these guys or this team and I hope you all enjoy every minute we have left with them.
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