As someone who has an unhealthy affinity for more, newer, and ever more advanced data, you’ll find that I’ve posted very little about Marquette’s robust metrics either here or on Twitter. Simply put, two games isn’t enough of a sample to get excited or worked up over for anything in particular.
Sure, it’s fun to see the gaudy stats and have a good chuckle. Josh Clark is blocking 22.1% of all shot attempts when he’s on the floor. Sananda Fru is grabbing almost 25% of Marquette’s misses on the offensive glass. As a team Marquette is only allowing an eFG% of 29.5%, which would be the best in D1 history.
But again, trying to extrapolate anything from two laughers is a recipe for terrible analysis. Best to just smile and wave until real opponents and larger samples come through.
So even though I’ve seen the stat come through a few times, I haven’t given much thought to the fact that Marquette is currently the best team in the country per Bart Torvik, if you take out preseason weights and just take the raw efficiency of the first 658 games of the season.
And taking a look at the rest of the names in the top-10, that’s some pretty serious good company, so yeah, I say that merits raising a banner. BEST TORVIK TEAM IN WEEK 1!
In order to start writing about it for this post, I pulled the numbers for the first week of the last 5 seasons as well, as I wanted to highlight how wild the swings are from these premature early stats are to the final ones. And a funny thing happened.
Using Torvik’s AdjO, AdjD and Barthag data for Marquette since 2022, there was a lot less variance from Week 1 results to the final stats. The final Barthag (Bart’s Pythagorean formula where 1 is the best) score was within 5% of the first week’s in 4 of Shaka Smart’s first 5 seasons, with 2026 and 2024 being dead on.
I truly thought all of the results would look like 2022, where there was a 93.1% increase in how the team played the full season compared to the first week. With cupcakes and blowouts and new players adapting to roles, I never take anything that happens too seriously. And though I still don’t, maybe it is a bit more indicative than I thought.
To be crystal clear, no, I don’t think Marquette is the best team in the country, on pace to put up the best Barthag in the site’s history. But what this data has shown me is that the direction of the team tends to show up fairly early under Shaka. So while I wouldn’t bet money on Marquette finishing the season in the top-5, I do think it might be better than my preseason projections of a team in the 7-9 range for an NCAA seed. This week will tell us a lot.
What about other teams?
You know by now I can’t just leave the data dives be Marquette specific. To get a bit of context, I took the top-10 teams from Week 1 of the last 5 seasons and then mapped out where they finished the season. Of the 50 teams on that list, 38 made the NCAA Tournament (76%), 19 finished in the top 10 (38%) and 7 made the final 4 (14%).
So once more, early unfiltered data isn’t some benchmark that locks in a team’s true form. It simply gives an indication of the general quality (particularly for some of the UC teams in the list that had only played 1 game). Unless, you are Houston. The Cougars made the Week 1 Top-10 cut every year from 2022 to 2025 and finished in the top-10 every time.
There’s a reason Bart, Ken and every other reputable rankings model keeps preseason weights in the formula for a few months. Trust them and have a bit of patience. It will sort itself out.
Should we worry about the shooting?
About the one thing that wasn’t spectacular this week was the 3-point shooting. Marquette went 4/21 (14.8%) against Mercyhurst and then 12/39 (30.8%) against Detroit Mercy, with three of those makes coming in super garbage time in the last 5 minutes. I didn’t expect this MU team to be a top shooting team (which made the results in the exhibitions so noteworthy) but I also didn’t expect them to be abysmal.
Per usual, the truth will most likely end up somewhere in the middle. Tracking the rolling 3pt% since 2022, this is Marquette’s 2nd worst percentage after a 2 game sample, with only that 2022 team being worse. That team finished at 34.4%, 123rd in the country. I’d sign up for that in a heartbeat.
The thing that does give me a bit of pause is the volume of the shots. It felt like Marquette was up 30+ for over half the games against Detroit Mercy. Having over half the attempts come from deep was unnecessary, and that was without even considering how few shots were falling.
Looking at Synergy, Marquette has already taken 44 catch and shoot 3s. It’s shooting 26.3% on guarded treys and only 28% on unguarded threes. I do expect the unguarded percentage to rise significantly with more games, but MU only shot 24% on guarded 3s last season. It might be an issue once more.
Still, the fact that Royce, Adrien and Nigel have combined to shoot 4/19 from distance (21.1%) and Marquette is putting up the insane numbers referenced at the top is a cause for positive surprise. They have shown over a decent sample they are much better shooters than that. If/when their shots start falling, look out.
Is the rebounding real?
And one of the reasons all the bricks haven’t hurt Marquette much, if any, is that it has morphed into a juggernaut on the offensive glass. Yes yes, playing 2 bad teams in laughers is bound to make the team look better than it actually is, but grabbing 50.7% of misses is just so unlike past Shaka teams. Of the 30 games that fall under Q4 since 2022, Marquette posted the best and 5th best OReb rates so far this season.
The biggest change isn’t schematic or stylistic, either.
They may not be top-10 good when all is said and done, but the personnel that’s driving the large offensive rebounding numbers is miles ahead of what Marquette has had in the recent past. Sananda Fru had a top-30 O-rebounding rate at Louisville in his one season there. You can see how his positioning and movement are just natural. He’s going to end up as the best rebounder in Shaka’s time at Marquette by a significant margin.
I already wrote at length about Josh Clark, but while he doesn’t quite reach Fru’s level, his length alone has him running into more rebounds than we are used to seeing. He doesn’t have the best hands and will get moved out of position by bigger players, but even once the numbers come back down a bit, they should finish on the higher end of recent Marquette bigs.
Is the defense real?
This Tweet still stands.
The starters in particular feel like the kind of ferocious, aggressive defense Shaka has dreamt of. I can put in a number of gaudy stats to show how awesome the defense has been, but I think we’ve seen that plenty in this article.
I don’t know if this will end up being an elite defense the full season, but just from an eye test/gut perspective, the movement, rotations and general activity makes me believe this has the chance to be one of the best we’ve seen in a while. Time will tell.
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