I think I can safely speak for all Marquette men’s basketball fans everywhere when I say that there isn’t an obvious thing to point at to generate optimism for the 2025-26 season. That’s a new thing for head coach Shaka Smart in Milwaukee.
Year 1: It’s Year 1! Fresh start, let’s see what happens!
Year 2: Hey, last year was a Vibes Only season, and they pulled an NCAA bid out of it! Lots to like here.
Year 3: They’re bringing back most of a Big East double championship team that earned the first NCAA tournament #2 seed in program history! This is going to be a hoot!
Year 4: Hey, Kam Jones looked great as the point guard while Tyler Kolek was hurt, things will be different, but I can see how it works.
See? You don’t have anything like that for this season, do you?
What we do have is a lot of If’s. Think about the conversations that you’ve had with your fellow Marquette fans since last season ended. How many times have you said something along the lines of:
These are things that have come up here or there, right? These are all things that we’re going to dive deeper into as we get into the individual player previews over the next few weeks. If you haven’t said these things out loud to another human being (or texted them, shouts to the group chat), then you’ve thought about some of them, right?
And what do all of those things have in common?
I started each and every single one of those sentences with the word “if.”
If. If. If. If. Iiiiiiiiiiiif.
All of the ones that I listed out above are probably not all of the ifs that you can assign to this season as we go into it. If you’ve got other ones, I’m more than happy to hear them in the comments. But my point is this: They don’t all have to work out for Marquette to mark this season as a success. Several of them probably do, but not all of them. Just enough to make it work.
But there’s a lot. There’s no way to get around that right now.
And until we see the wins start to stack up in November, we’re going to keep asking them.
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