MILWAUKEE — Early predictions are coming in for the 2023/24 NCAA men's basketball Top 25, and several media outlets are predicting Marquette will be the No. 1 team.
Marquette went into the March Madness tournament this year as a No. 2 seed, and a No. 6 team overall in the AP Top 25. But next year, will they be the top ranked team? The Athletic, the Washington Post, and Stadium are all predicting the answer to that question will be yes.
Predictions started coming in early Tuesday morning, just hours after the 2022/23 season came to an end.
The Athletic shared its predictions on Twitter, listing Marquette as its No. 1 team followed by Purdue, Creighton, and Miami.
The 2022-23 season has been over for several hours now. So it’s way too early to look ahead to next season.@SethDavisHoops did it anyway. How far did UConn fall after winning it all?https://t.co/7bCTZ8gTCW
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) April 4, 2023
Jeff Goodman, a Stadium basketball insider, also shared his predictions Tuesday morning. He had Marquette as the No. 1 team, but different from the Athletic, Goodman followed it up with Duke, Michigan State, FAU, and Purdue.
The Washington Postpredicted Marquette would be the No. 1 team next season, followed by Purdue, Connecticut, and Duke.
Not everyone has Marquette as the No. 1 team in their early predictions, however. ESPN released its early predictions, listing Marquette as the No. 2 team. Marquette is also the No. 2 team on the Fox Sports early prediction list.
These predictions come after Marquette won the Big East Tournament for the first time ever, and were named the Big East Conference champions. They went into the March Madness tournament as a No. 2 seed and lost in the second round to Michigan State.
Marquette's head coach, Shaka Smart, will return next season, hot off an AP Coach of the Year award. He was also named the Big East Coach of the Year, alongside Junior Tyler Kolek who was named Big East Player of the Year.
Marquette's Shaka Smart voted men's AP coach of the year
By: The Associated Press
Shaka Smart has packed an entire career's worth of experiences into 14 years as a college head coach. He led VCU to an improbable Final Four as a 30-something wunderkind in 2011, guided mighty Texas to a Big 12 Tournament title during six otherwise tepid years in Austin, and now has turned Marquette into a Big East beast.
It's sometimes easy to forget he's still just 45 years old.
Yet his work with the Golden Eagles this season might have been his best: Picked ninth in the 11-team league by its coaches, they won the regular-season title going away, then beat Xavier to win their first Big East Tournament championship.
That earned Smart the AP coach of the year award Friday. He garnered 24 of 58 votes from a national media panel to edge Kansas State's Jerome Tang, who received 13 votes before guiding the Wildcats to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament, and Houston's Kelvin Sampson, who earned 10 before taking the Cougars to the Sweet 16.
Voting opened after the regular season and closed at the start of the NCAA Tournament, where the No. 2 seed Golden Eagles were knocked out in the second round by Michigan State and Smart's longtime mentor, Tom Izzo.
“I'm very grateful to win this award," said Smart, the second Marquette coach to take it home after Hall of Famer Al McGuire in 1971, "but obviously it always comes back to the guys you have on your team.
“Early on,” Smart said, “we had a real sense the guys had genuine care and concern for one another, and we had a very good foundation for relationships that we could continue to build on. And over the course of seasons, you go through so many different experiences as a team. And those experiences either bring you closer together or further apart. Our guys did a great job, even through adverse experiences, even through challenges, becoming closer together.”
It's hardly surprising such cohesion is what Smart would choose to remember most from a most memorable season.
The native of Madison, Wisconsin, who holds a master's degree in social science from California University of Pennsylvania, long ago earned a reputation for building close bonds with players and a tight-knit camaraderie within his teams.
No matter how high or low the Golden Eagles were this season, those traits carried them through.
“Everything that we go through, whether it be the retreat that we went on before the season, all the workouts in the summer, he’s preaching his culture,” said Tyler Kolek, a third-team All-American. “And he's showing his leadership every single day, and just trying to impart that on us, and kind of put it in our DNA. Because it's definitely in his DNA.”
That's reflected in the way Smart, who accepted the Marquette job two years ago after an often bumpy tenure at Texas, has rebuilt the Golden Eagles program after it had begun to languish under Steve Wojciechowski.
Sure, Smart landed his share of transfers — Kolek among them — in an era in which the portal has become so prevalent. But he largely built a team that finished 29-7 this season around high school recruits, eschewing a quick fix in the hopes of long-term stability. Among those prospects were Kam Jones, their leading scorer, and do-everything forward David Joplin.
“He teaches us lots of things about the importance of each other,” Joplin said. “He lets us know, time and time again, that we can’t do anything without each other, but together we can do anything.”
That sounds like a decidedly old-school approach to building a college basketball program.
One embraced by a still-youthful head coach.
“I think being a head coach has never been more complicated, never been more nuanced, and never more all-encompassing," Smart told the AP in a wide-ranging interview last week. "Does that mean it's harder? You could say that.
“What makes your job less hard," Smart said, "is having a captive audience in your players, and guys that truly understand and own what goes into winning, and that's what we had this past year. But those things just don't happen. There are a lot of steps that have to occur on the part of a lot of people, not just the coach, to get to where you have a winning environment.”
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