Marquette Women’s Basketball: Better Or Worse?

It was a pretty accepted idea that Marquette women’s basketball clearly got better across the span of Cara Consuegra’s first season in charge in Milwaukee. Sure, there was a little bit of Zero Expectations that helped that out, but the math maths out pretty good here. Through the first nine games of the season, Consuegra had the Golden Eagles playing like the #81 team in the country, according to BartTorvik.com’s data sorting, as they started out 6-3 including wrapping up that run with a road loss against Bowling Green. After that point, MU played like the #51 team in the country. In just Big East regular season play, that ranking ticked up to #48.

It was clear that the team was playing better as the season went along. That made sense as Consuegra was reassembling a roster on the fly and figuring out how to get her players to fit together in the right ways to be the most productive team they could be. All told, Marquette finished the year with BartTorvik.com’s #30 ranked defense, and when you take that information and combine it with the knowledge that Consuegra was bringing back her entire roster for 2025-26, it was a reasonable conclusion that the Golden Eagles would be better in Year 2. After all, now they’re used to playing with each other and can just pick up right where they left off.

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Record

Year 1: 21-11, 12-6 Big East (.656 & .667 winning percentages)
Year 2: 18-12, 12-8 Big East (.600 & .600 winning percentages)

Verdict: Worse

Wait one goshdarn second, what do you mean, Marquette had a worse record in Year Two? I mean, sure, obviously, going from “in the WBIT” to “not in the WBIT” tells that story, but how did they win a lower percentage of their games? Oh, wait, is this a thing where MU just played two more Big East games and lost them both and thus that’s taking away from non-conference wins type of thing? They must have been a better quality team in terms of overall efficiency, right?

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BartTorvik.com Ranking