About a month ago, I noted that Marquette was one of the worst teams in the country, not just D1, at hitting contested spot up 3s.
After a stretch of much better play, I figured that the shooting must have stabilized a bit, so I checked in again on the Synergy results for Marquette’s contested spot up shooting. Nope, still terrible.
As of the morning of January 13, 2026, Marquette ranks 365th out of 365 D1 teams, making only 17.9% of its spot up 3s on the year. If you take out the D1 filter, MU ranks 1,448th out of 1,472 teams with at least 10 possessions, ahead of the Lakeland Rustlers in Canada, but behind Johnston & Wales University.
I posted the list of MU’s peers for a bit of comic relief, but it truly is astounding to put it like this.
And zooming back in to D1, to put that 17.9% in perspective, Marquette is 5.1% points worse than the 364th ranked Siena Saints. I plotted the 3-point shots per game and accuracy on a graph for a visual, and I probably didn’t even need to fill in the bubble in yellow for most to be able to identify where MU sits.
And one last note on this, I dug into the last 15 seasons of Synergy and Marquette is currently the worst contested spot-up shooting team since at least 2012, when Prairie View A&M connected on 18.1% of its shots. That’s a sample of over 5,700 and Marquette currently sits at the very bottom.
Glimmer of hope?
So it might come as a fairly big shock when you hear that Marquette is one of the best teams in the Big East at connecting on unguarded spot up shots. Yes, you read that right. There is a real stat that shows us Marquette can in fact put the biscuit in the basket.
Through the first 17 games, MU is shooting 42.1% from 3 on unguarded spot up 3s, taking an average of 11.8 a game.
As you can see in the chart above, MU isn’t just good at making them, it takes a lot of them compared to most teams. That 11.8 a game is 25th most in the country this year, and the highest volume in Shaka’s MU tenure.
I’m Confused
You aren’t alone, it’s very difficult to square those two numbers together. You’d expect teams to be better at easier shots (unguarded) but generally speaking, there shouldn’t be a gulf that wide.
And under Shaka, there hasn’t been. Prior to this season, MU shot unguarded spot ups about 5% better than contested ones.
But putting this year’s numbers in the fold pushes that variance to the extreme, with a 24% point gap. And if you go back to 2019, you get a similar story with Wojo’s teams.
So what does that tell us? My money would be on Marquette not finishing the season as the worst 3pt shooting contested spot up team in recent D1 history. Though I probably would expect a bit of a drop in the unguarded section too.
And if you allow me to throw a bit more conjecture, I think some of this is mental, and helps to connect the dots between what the staff is seeing outside of games and the overall incompetence behind the line that we’ve seen in games. In lower pressure situations, like open 3s, we see plenty of success.
Heck, in games Marquette is already down by 16 or more points, its shooting 33% on contested spot ups, which isn’t amazing, but almost twice as accurate as the average.
I don’t know if there’s a big takeaway from all this data other than, “that’s weird,” but I will point out that there is so much more that goes into a result other than the 35% of shots put up in a game that fall in these 2 buckets. I’m not trying to boil down the season results to date simply to spot up jumpers.
But when you add the fact players aren’t hitting contested shots to the fact that Marquette is 356th in the country in terms of efficiency at the rim, you get a little better understanding of why we are seeing what we are seeing this season.
Bonus Chart, here’s how Marquette players have shot on unguarded spot up 3s each year of Shaka’s tenure.
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