You may have already seen our rundown on what's in the preseason projections for Marquette men's basketball over at KenPom.com . If you have, thank you, if you haven't, scoot yourself over there for that right quick. When I saw CBS college basketball insider Matt Norlander post on Bluesky that the KenPom projections are up, as I went to open up a fresh blog post for that, my brain said "HEY GO CHECK ON THE TORVIK WOMEN'S RANKINGS."
So I did. I published the Summer Vibe Check on DePaul women's basketball back on September 27th, so it's been a minute since I peeked on on BartTorvik.com and the women's basketball analytics over there. LO AND BEHOLD, there are preseason projections for the 2026-27 season ready and live! My apologies to Bart if he pushed those live several days ago and I am only just thinking to go check right now.
IN ANY CASE, Marquette starts off the year at #76 in the preseason projections . After going 18-12 last year and posting a 12-8 record in Big East play, Cara Consuegra's team was #63 in the Torvik computations. I'm not necessarily enthused about the idea that MU is going to be worse this season, or rather that a computer is confirming my fears about this upcoming season, but there you go.
The computers say that the Golden Eagles will have the #76 offense and the #85 defense in the country. Both of those would be steps back from what Marquette did a year ago. It would be a big step back from the defense from Consuegra's first year as well, when MU ranked #30 in the country in defensive efficiency. Marquette missed the NCAA tournament that year because their offense was very bad at #100 in efficiency, so yes, #76 would be better than that but most likely not good enough to get a tournament bid even with a 76 team field and all sorts of new extra at-large bids.
Let's look at the whole Big East to give you an idea of how Marquette fits in here.
Connecticut —#1
Villanova —#21
St. John's —#58
Creighton —#66
Seton Hall —#74
Marquette —#76
Butler —#80
Providence —#104
Georgetown —#125
Xavier —#139
DePaul —#224
Well, that hit a cliff real quick, didn't it? It's a bad sign that there's only two teams that are reasonably projected as NCAA tournament teams. With a 76 team field, anyone in the top 50 should be a clear candidate for inclusion, but St. John's comes in as third best in the conference at #58. It would very much be in the best interest of the league for at least one other squad to get their act together and jump into tournament contention here, but more importantly, it would be even better if 4/11ths of the conference wasn't a borderline laughing stock. It gets easier to push yourself into tournament contention if you don't have to play Quadrant 4 games in conference play, which is definitely the Big East's bigger problem than the chances of only sending two teams to dance in March.
I can't give you a for sure game by game breakdown of Marquette's record quite yet because schedules are still a work in progress for BartTorvik.com. There's two buy games missing from the non-conference slate and eight of the Big East games. The projection, figuring MU will be picked to win the two missing buy games, for the non-conference slate is 7-4, with the Golden Eagles dropping three of their four non-con road games (shouts to Milwaukee as a road game, MU by 12) along with their game against Illinois in the Bahamas.
It looks like the Big East games that are missing are both contests against Creighton, Providence, Georgetown, and DePaul. If we figure that MU will be favored in all six games against sub-100 teams there — they're favored by 4 at Xavier, after all — and they'd get a split with the Bluejays, that's 7-1 against these eight games. Mix that with the 5-7 for the 12 on the board already, and that's 12-8 in Big East play. Add non-con play, and that's a projection of 19-12 going into the conference tournament.
Gut feeling is that 20 wins are going to need to be the minimum to get an at-large bid, so we'll have to wait and see how much Cara Consuegra can get her team to outperform these preseason projections.
Thoughts? Questions? Outlandish predictions? Head to the comments section and fire away, that's what it's there for.
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