When the Marquette Warriors face the Syracuse Orangemen come Saturday afternoon, the ‘Cuse 2-3 zone won’t be the only familiar thing on the court. For perhaps the fourth straight NCAA Tournament game in a row, Marquette will seemingly enter the matchup as the underdog. That startling stat includes the first round matchup against 13 seeded Davidson who was picked to win by almost every national media outlet. However, as it happens every so often, the so called national “experts” are oh so wrong.

Marquette enters its first Elite Eight game under head coach Buzz Williams after back to back Sweet 16’s the previous two years. Even with all that post season experience, national writers such as ESPN’s Myron Medcalf ranked Marquette 16^th out of 16 of the remaining teams left in the tournament. When asked about that article Buzz Williams snapped back on Thursday night saying “We will be dead last when we wake up on Saturday, too, I guess we will be 8^th out of 8^th”. After each round, the haters get stronger, the coach’s tolerance for lack of respect gets lower, and most importantly, the players drive and fire gets deeper.

It should come to no surprise that when most of you woke up this Friday morning, those national “experts” were back at it predicting the outcome of the Marquette/Syracuse game. If my personal calculations are correct, I counted 4 in favor of the Orangemen and 0 in favor of the Warriors. When Vander Blue was once again asked about the lack of respect and attention he added “Everyone doubting us is normal, and I feel like they should keep doing it.”

Kyle Stack

If Marquette had it their way, they would want to be the so called “underdogs” in the rest of their tournament games.  The results so far seem to speak for themselves.