Something No. 7 Marquette men’s basketball has emphasized all season is “winning ugly.”
And that was exactly what the Golden Eagles did Tuesday.
When Georgetown went on a 27-6 run in the first half and led by as many as 14 points, Marquette could have just thrown in the towel and gave in. When it seemed like fouls weren’t going their way and shots weren’t going in, the Golden Eagles could have taken their foot off the gas pedal. And when Georgetown had a one-point lead with two minutes to go, Marquette could have easily backed down from the dogfight.
But it didn’t.
The Golden Eagles (14-2, 5-0 Big East) fought back tooth-and-nail in the second half, outscoring the Hoyas (12-3, 3-1 Big East) 45-28 to win 74-66 Tuesday night at Fiserv Forum.
“The way the guys came out to start the second half was the difference in this game,” Marquette head coach Shaka Smart said. “We challenged them at halftime, we talk about us versus us to win the spiritual war in our own huddle, and I thought our guys did that.”
The first half was less than ideal for Marquette, as it was rattled by Georgetown’s zone defense and extended run. It finished the half shooting just 29% from the field.
“We were tentative,” Smart said. “We didn’t do a good job of getting it down the floor. We weren’t aggressive enough. We held the ball too much. We weren’t ready to shoot enough.”
But to start the final frame, Marquette flipped the game on its head, going on a 16-4 run to take a 45-42 lead at the 13:48 mark. Junior guard Chase Ross was a key contributor in the run, scoring half of his team’s points.
“He was phenomenal,” Smart said. “A blind man could see that. He was the best player on the floor in this game, and that’s saying a lot because they had a lot of really good players out there and we had some good players out there.”
27 PTS | 6 STL
Both career highs for Chase Ross 🔥🔥#MUBB | #WeAreMarquette pic.twitter.com/al3bUo6N4i
— Marquette Basketball (@MarquetteMBB) January 8, 2025
On a night when Ben Gold, David Joplin and Kam Jones just shot a combined 25% from the field, the Dallas, Texas native stepped up, scoring 17 of his career-high 27 points in the second half. He also finished with a career-high six steals.
“You talked about winning ugly, and this is for us a really good win,” Smart said. “Those guys were all forced into inefficient shooting nights. So, if you said those guys are going to go 8-for-31, you’re like, ‘Okay, how do we find a way to win?’ It says a lot about our guys’ character that we did that.”
In the final two minutes when the game could have gone either way, the Golden Eagles shot a perfect 8-for-8 from the free throw line to close the door on the Hoyas and close out the game.
Marquette finished the second half shooting 42.9% from the floor and 33.8% from beyond the arc to move to 5-0 in Big East play for the first time since the 2008-09 season.
It did that by winning ugly, a phrase that Ross provided his own definition for after the game.
“Winning ugly means grimy, vicious,” Ross said. “Just doing anything you have to do to win the game, win a possession, win the half. Literally anything.”
This article was written by Kaylynn Wright. She can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter/X @KaylynnWrightMU.
