CLEVELAND — All the emotions of March were experienced on Friday night.
First, there was the anxiety, as Marquette men’s basketball prepared for tip-off, hoping to make another deep NCAA Tournament run. Then, there was the disappointment, when Marquette got down by as many as eight points while trailing for the majority of the first half.
Excitement was felt when the Golden Eagles roared back. MU had battled its way back into the game, leading by three with 12:29 to play. But in the end, a 10-0 New Mexico run down the stretch led to perhaps the most detected and persistent emotion of the night: heartbreak.
“You know, this hurts,” MU head coach Shaka Smart said after MU’s season-ending loss 75-66 loss to New Mexico. “Losing this game is very hard to accept for everyone in our locker room. But it’s our reality right now. We’ve got to use that to push us to be better.”
While the end of the season almost always stings for everyone inside the program, it’s always the worst for the seniors. Especially, these seniors. A group of guys that stuck together for four years. Through the highs and the lows, the ups and the downs, MU’s quartet was unbreakable.
To make four NCAA Tournaments in four years, with the same core guys, is incredibly rare given the state of college athletics today with the transfer portal and the rise of NIL, but it took time to get to that point.
When Smart took over at Marquette in the spring of 2021, he walked into a room where familiarity was far from reality.
“When we first got here, I remember we had a meal as a team in the Al McGuire Center and everyone was kind of sitting in different corners of the room and nobody knew each other,” Smart said earlier this season. “I remember thinking, man, we got a long way to go with the relationships that we need to build.”
But the journey that Smart would go on over the next four years with Stevie Mitchell, Kam Jones, David Joplin and Cameron Brown, would be nothing short of special.
But four years, a Big East regular season championship, Big East Tournament championship, three NCAA Tournament wins and a Sweet 16 later — the ride came to an abrupt stop. The Golden Eagles had fallen short, thus ending one of the greatest four-year runs by one single class in program history.
“This has been a lot of fun wearing this uniform,” Jones said through tears. “Being with these guys every day, spending time with these guys. No other group I’d rather play with.
“I love these guys to death, and I hate it ended this way.”
The MU seniors amassed 98 wins together, but the on the court stuff will always serve secondary to the relationships that they built off the hardwood.
“The things I’m going to miss the most is off-the-court stuff,” Joplin said. “Yeah, we don’t have practice tomorrow. There’s not going to be no more locker room talk. But the best moments that we have are just when we’re together, just at the dorm, at our apartment hanging out, fooling around, being us, being kids, doing what we love, playing basketball every day. Those things I’m going to remember for the rest of my life. I’ve built relationships with these guys I’m going to have for the rest of my life.”
Joplin tried to will the Golden Eagles to the finish line Friday against New Mexico, scoring a game-high 28 points. However, 40 combined points from the battery that powers the Lobos — Donovan Dent and Nelly Junior Joseph — resulted in the Golden Eagles missing the second round of the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2022.
Marquette was once a top-five team in the country back in December. It walked out of the non-conference portion of its schedule with one of the strongest résumés in the country. However, inconsistencies resulted in a 5-8 finish for the Golden Eagles in their final 13 games, something that they will be left pondering in the offseason.
“I think that’s a question that we’ll be thinking about a lot over these next several weeks and months,” Smart said. “Obviously, we’ve been thinking about that.
“As a coach, it’s my job to help our guys be our best. It’s such a fine line between caring as much as our guys do, but then also letting go of certain things outside of your control, including the result. Because if we could control the result every time, it would be a win, and going after it.”
(Photo by Marquette Athletics)
It’d be fair to say MU dealt with its fair share of adversity this season. Mitchell dealt with a hodgepodge of injuries, as did Chase Ross. It also didn’t help that Sean Jones had to take a medical redshirt due to a torn ACL that he suffered about halfway through last season.
But this is March, and only the strong can survive. Joplin emphasized that the only thing you can do in The Big Dance is win.
“There’s no excuses in the tournament,” he said. “They (New Mexico) had guys that made plays. They were able to get deflections that were costly for us.”
The Milwaukee, Wisconsin native became the program’s all-time leader in games played on Friday (139), passing Lazar Hayward (138 in 2006-10) in the loss.
Long after the dust had settled, and the loss began to set in, Mitchell — who scored just three points on 1-of-7 shooting from the floor in 28 minutes of action — fought through tears to try and accurately sum up what his four years at Marquette meant to him.
“It’s been great,” he said. “Several years, summer practices, just everything. We tried to give it everything we had. We had some great moments, and we had some terrible moments, like today. Unfortunately, terrible moments are the ones that tend to stick more to the memory.
“I’m proud of everybody, when you just love your teammates, your coaches and the place so much, it makes everything so much worse when you feel like you failed.”
Looking ahead to the future, Marquette is set to have 10 scholarship players back next season if they would choose to return. It’s also got a highly touted four-man recruiting class set to arrive on campus this summer.
Regardless, Joplin, Jones and Mitchell aren’t guys that the Golden Eagles can just replace, but that’s not deterring the confidence that any of them have for the future of the program, even as they move on from it.
“I’m extremely confident, and I’m going to be the biggest fan going forward,” Mitchell said. “I love these guys so much; I love their coaches, and I love Marquette so much.
“Getting to see these guys every day, I know how much they’re capable of, how great they’re going to be and how hard they work. So, I know they’re going to be better than we were ever able to be, and I’m going to be right there cheering for ’em.”
This story was written by Matthew Baltz. He can be reached at matthew.baltz@marquette.edu or on Twitter/X @MatthewBaltzMU.
