The 2025-26 college basketball season is right around the corner, so let’s dive into the Marquette men’s basketball roster and take a look at what to expect from each player this season. Going forward in these Player Previews, we’ll be going in this order: The four true freshmen expected to play this season going in alphabetical order by last name — skipping past Sheek Pearson who is projected to redshirt — then moving on to the redshirt freshman, then the redshirt junior who missed last year, and then going through the returning players in ascending order of total minutes played in 2024-25.

We’re going to organize our thoughts about the upcoming season as it relates to each player into categories, as we always do:

• Reasonable Expectations
• Why You Should Get Excited
• Potential Pitfalls

With that out of the way, we move on to the freshman who may have tremendous upside that we may or may not see this year……

Michael Phillips II

Freshman —#35 — Forward — 6’6” — 195 lbs — Rolesville, North Carolina

We’re gonna change things up evvvver so slightly here, and just real quick jump into the first category, trust me, it’ll make sense. But first, some Signing Day commentary from Marquette, because it doesn’t fit anywhere else here and it’s important to include when we’re talking about freshmen.

Phillips II (6-6, 175) plays under head coach DeShannon Morris at GRACE Christian School and reclassified into the 2025 recruiting class.  In 2023-24, he averaged 15.8 points and 6.4 rebounds per contest and helped the Eagles to a 27-8 overall record and the league title.  He was named All-Capital City Conference and was named the school’s most outstanding athlete.  As a sophomore, he contributed 16.2 points per contest and in the last two years, the Eagles are 15-1 in conference play.  He competed on the EYBL circuit for Boo Williams and was named the top player at the 2024 EYBL event held in St. Louis.

And here’s what head coach Shaka Smart said about him:

“Michael can shoot it from deep,” Smart said.  “He can really rise up and comes off screens off the ball as well as any young player that I have seen.

“He has great length and blocks a lot of shots,” Smart added. “He likes playing defense, which is important and is also very, very smart in terms of his IQ for the game.  He has a way of knowing when things are important and learning and locking in on those things, on and off the court.”

Reasonable Expectations

I want to start here with Michael Phillips’ current recruiting rankings. He’s #105 in the country according to 247 Sports’ internal system and #144 in their Composite. On3 slots him in at #144 in their Industry Ranking. ESPN is an outlier at #99 and remember: They only rank out to 100 spots.

That’s all in the Class of 2025, of course. However, when Phillips committed to Marquette in August 2024, on his 17th birthday, he was a Class of 2026 prospect that was reclassifying to start college right now, shortly after his 18th birhday. Why am I making this point?

Because at the time, On3 had Phillips ranked #33 in the country in 2026.

There are reasons for that, and if you click on that link, you can go read Jamie Shaw explain why they were the only recruiting company that had the North Carolinian not just in the top 40 but ranked at all at the time. The point I’m making here is thus: How close is Phillips to being a guy worthy of being a top 40 prospect when it’s currently a year before he was “supposed” to be enrolling in college?

Even better, and more in tune with our point for reasonable expectations: How close is Michael Phillips to being a contributor on this year’s team? To put it another way: Sheek Pearson was a consensus top 75 prospect in the Class of 2026 when he committed to Marquette, with ESPN ranking him in the top 40. Now he’s somewhere between #70 and #138 with ESPN keeping him out of the 2025 top 100…. and Pearson’s going to redshirt….. but there’s no announced plan to do the same with Phillips even though he looks like he’s not pulling in the same kind of current rankings.

To drive all of this home, the BartTorvik.com projections for Marquette this season have Phillips as one of the top 10 contributors. You might think that sounds exciting and good, but it’s with 9% of minutes projected. 9% of 40 is 3.6 minutes per game, which is roughly long enough to say “well, he’s playing but never gets a chance to do anything.” 9% of minutes is less than what Caedin Hamilton did in Big East play last year, just to give you an idea of what we’re talking about.

Why You Should Get Excited

But what if Phillips is ready to be a top 40 prospect like On3 thought, just a year earlier? What if ESPN is right about Phillips as a top 100 prospect this year? What if his high school coach’s views of Phillips as a similar shooter to Kevin Durant is right? What if DeShannon Morris is right about Phillips fitting in perfectly to Shaka Smart’s program, so right to the point where he didn’t let the fact that his former player Keeyan Itejere didn’t quite work out in Milwaukee slow him down while letting Smart and his staff know about Phillips?

Marquette is in need of a breakout player this year. Honestly, probably multiple breakout players. They return one player who averaged more than eight points a game last year and one player who averaged more than four rebounds per game. There are multiple roles available for someone to jump forward and grab one. Why can’t it be a guy like Phillips that everyone seems to agree that he has tremendous upside?

Potential Pitfalls

I think I outlined the biggest possible pitfall for Phillips while trying to nail down what’s a reasonable expectation for him: What if he is actually a year away from being able to be a contributor at the high major Division 1 level? There’s nothing wrong with that, he’s a freshman, sometimes it takes a moment to get it together and make the jump to a more difficult level of competition.

The other part of the problem here for Phillips is who he might have to beat out for playing time. At 6’6” and 195 pounds, I don’t think he’s going to get a lot of minutes playing the 4 on this roster. Listed as a forward, I don’t think he’s going to be earning a lot of playing time at point guard.

So: Is he getting minutes in front of Chase Ross? Zaide Lowery? Damarius Owens? Seems unlikely, right? Can Phillips distinguish himself ahead of Ian Miletic or Adrien Stevens amongst only the freshmen on the wing? That’s more likely, but we’re talking about splitting 80 minutes of court time between three returning guys and whatever minutes the freshmen can soak up. 25-25-25 for Ross/Lowery/Owens is 75 of the 80 right there, so unless Phillips shows himself to be undeniable at a particular task, I don’t know if we’re going to see much of him this year.

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