College basketball: Georgetown trounces Marquette.
Hoyas stomp Golden Eagles
WASHINGTON - As the seconds and minutes ticked down, the Marquette men’s basketball team began to take on the same, hollow appearance. Their shoulders slumped, their stares went blank and a few heads drooped.
Already mired in a stretch of poor performances, the Golden Eagles reached a new low Saturday afternoon at the Verizon Center. Marquette (15-10, 6-7 Big East) looked passionless and disjointed at both ends of the court on the way to its worst loss in Big East play, falling, 8062, to Georgetown (14-12, 5-8).
With four losses in five games following its win over top-ranked Villanova, Marquette is stumbling toward the end of the season and is running out of time to make up for missed opportunities.
“When you get to February and March and you have a chance to do some good things like the vast majority of the teams in our conference do ... the intensity raises, the stakes raise,” coach Steve Wojciechowski said. “So what you did to get to that point isn’t good enough . ... You’ve got to be able to raise the intensity and preparation and heart and toughness and execution. I’ve not done a good job to get our team to that point.”
The line between the Golden Eagles being in the game and out of it came in the moments just before and immediately following halftime. After trailing by as many as nine in the first 10 minutes, Marquette rallied to within a basket due to 18 points from bench players. Redshirt junior Andrew Rowsey led the way with 11 points, including 6 of 6 free-throw attempts.
With 80 seconds until halftime and Marquette trailing, 35-32, senior center Luke Fischer missed a free throw that would have completed a three-point play. Twelve seconds later, Georgetown’s L.J. Peak deposited a layup. The Hoyas then added two more points from the freethrow line and Jagan Mosely put back a missed free throw as Georgetown took a 41-32 lead into the break.
When play resumed, Peak again got to the rim unimpeded to give the Hoyas a double-digit lead. Facing adversity on the road, Marquette fractured and broke down. One by one the Golden Eagles devolved into trying to beat the Hoyas’ defense themselves instead of relying on the ball movement and unselfish play that had served them so well on the way to becoming one of the nation’s most efficient offensive teams.
“The key for our team is ball movement and sharing the ball,” Wojciechowski said. “At times when offense gets hard, we try to do it on our own and that’s just a terrible strategy.”
Marquette finished with just nine assists, its second single-digit total of the season and recorded its second-lowest point total, while Georgetown’s lead eventually ballooned as high as 20 and never went back down to single digits. The Hoyas, who shot 53.7%, were led by sophomore center Jessie Govan with 23 points and Peak and senior Rodney Pryor, who each had 20. They improved to 10-1 when those three all score in double figures.
“We just have to be unselfish and do it the way the coaches want us to do it,” redshirt junior Duane Wilson said. “I feel like today we played how we wanted to play. We didn’t play how the coaches wanted us to play . ... That’s the reason why we lost. And we didn’t play hard.”
Marquette got 14 points from senior Jajuan Johnson and Wilson led a 31-point bench effort with 12 points, one off his season high.
The Golden Eagles now have a week to prepare for a National Marquette Day matchup with No. 25 Xavier. They know the situation has grown increasingly dire, but they still believe their goal of reaching the NCAA Tournament is attainable.
“I think at this point it’s nothing we can learn,” Wilson said. “We just have to grow up. It’s no more coach babying us and telling us, ‘Guys, we can be a great team.’ ... There’s no more excuses. We’ve just got to get the job done.”