Marquette Basketball: Takeaways from Golden Eagles so far in 2020-21 season
By Max Marmitt
3. Turnovers…Turnovers… Turnovers…
A recurring issue the last several years, there are many games/stretches where Marquette frequently can not take care of the ball. Through the first 10 games of the season, Marquette turns the ball over on average 14.6 times per game and on 21.2 percent of their possessions, 225th in the country at minimizing turnovers.
It’s an obvious and mundane take to point out that Marquette has put themselves in a better position to win when they do limit turnovers. Against Wisconsin, Marquette only turned the ball over 11 times. After a sloppy first half at Creighton, MU only gave up 5 takeaways in the second half (and only 12 in the game).
As mentioned earlier, Marquette had a disastrous 24 turnovers against Oklahoma State in a single digit loss. In a back and forth game against UCLA, Marquette turned the ball over 18 times in another single digit loss. In Marquette’s last game in by far their worst performance of the season versus Villanova, 17 turnovers added to one of many reasons for the loss.
On the other end, Marquette also does not force turnovers even close to a frequent rate. More will be said about overall outlook of the defense in an upcoming slide, but Marquette forces a turnover on 14.8 percent of their defensive possessions, 312th in the country.
As much as I want to say that limiting turnovers is definitely a correctable issue, because it is, too many turnovers has been a characteristic for most of the Coach Wojciechowski era. To sugarcoat the issue a little bit, turnovers occur far more often in college than at the professional level (but still, many other major conference teams know how to take care of the ball).
Almost a decade ago, former ESPN duo Peter Keating and Jordan Brenner came up with the ideal “Giant Killer” strategy for March Madness upsets. The main purpose of the strategy is generating as many extra possessions for one team as possible, and creating turnovers is one of those keys.
Updated today, is Kenpom’s “four factors,” which includes effective field goal percentage, turnovers, offensive rebound percentages and free throws attempted per amount of field goals attempted, all factor that analyze each team’s offense and defense.
I point this out not just because Marquette creates a disadvantage for the turnover aspect of the four factors, but they’re actually pretty good in the other three factors on the offensive end (more to come on that and more to come analyze the defense).
To draw back to this recurring tendency, even when Marquette was a nationally ranked top ten team for most of conference play during 2019, a year where they were a 5 seed in the NCAA tournament, Marquette still turned the ball over on 19.3% of their possessions (239th in the country) and only created turnovers on 16.6% of their possessions (297th in the country).
I’m generally optimistic of Marquette, but I expect the turnover issue to remain a problem. Hopefully Marquette can reduce the impact of the problem or maybe even eliminate the problem altogether, but it’s hard to see it changing. That being said, Marquette frequently seems to find a way to keep themselves in a game where they turn the ball over a lot, and they have won plenty of games with a high amount of turnovers in the Wojo era as well.