Marquette Women’s Basketball Preview: vs St. John’s

It’s nothing but Big East games for Marquette women’s basketball from here on out.

They wrapped up non-conference play on December 20th with an 86-43 victory over Division 2 Truman State, just three days after losing 89-53 to #1 UConn. Yes, that does mean Marquette started Big East play before finishing non-conference play, which is why the Golden Eagles are 8-4 on the year and already 2-1 in the league.

Between now and March 1st, Cara Consuegra’s squad will play the remaining 17 games of the conference slate. In terms of the order of everything, MU did gain a slight advantage in how the first three went. Two of them were on the road, which means the Golden Eagles have nine home games and just eight road games left. Even better, they already knocked out the mostly-speaking-guaranteed loss at Connecticut. Relative to that, all eight road games left to go are all winnable contests as Marquette goes searching for Consuegra’s first NCAA tournament bid as MU’s head coach.

The eight day break for Christmas was quite well timed for Marquette, to be honest. Jordan Meulemans didn’t even travel to Connecticut for that game because of illness, and then three days later, Jaidynn Mason wasn’t in the McGuire Center for the Truman State game, also for illness reasons. I think we can presume that it’s the same illness reason, and seeing as Meulemans played 21 minutes against TSU, there’s no reason to think that Mason will be impacted come Monday night. Better than that though: That’s eight days off for whatever the illness was to shake its way through anyone else on the roster.

Unfortunately, Kennedi Perkins’ leg doesn’t work quite the same way. She went down very quickly in the Truman State game after starting in place of Mason, and eventually emerged from the locker room with a boot on her right foot. That could be as simple as “sprained it, immediate compression is good, she’ll be fine.” It could also be more complicated, as we saw Abbey Cracknell suffer a twist of some kind in the opener, limp her way off the bench at the end of the game, turn up in a boot five days later for Game #2, and she hasn’t played since.

One last thing, going into the final 17 games of the Big East slate: BartTorvik.com projects the Golden Eagles to end up at 12-8 in the Big East. We can feel pretty comfortable guessing that a second loss to UConn is coming, but that means MU would go 10-6 in the other games. Except….. Marquette is favored by the Torvik computer in all but four of the other 16. 14-6 in the Big East is a lot different than 12-8 when it comes time for the selection committee to start naming names. There’s some coin toss-ish games along the way here, including MU’s road trip against Georgetown, which projects as a loss right now, so it’s going to take Marquette’s best effort some of the time to make sure they lock down the wins they can get.

The point I’m trying to make is: It’d be pretty neat to be 18-7 or better overall going into the Valentine’s Day game against UConn. Just take care of business, one game after another.

Big East Game #4: vs St. John’s Red Storm (11-3, 1-2 Big East)

Date: Monday, December 29, 2025
Time: 6:30pm Central
Location: Al McGuire Center, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Streaming:ESPN+
Live Stats:Stat Broadcast
Twitter Updates:@MarquetteWBB
Bluesky Updates:@AnonymousEagle

Marquette is 23-13 all time against St. John’s. The Golden Eagles have won 10 of the last 13 meetings and 14 of the last 18 after taking a 57-55 decision in the only meeting last year.

The good news for St. John’s is that they’re 11-3 on the year after being picked to finish sixth in the Big East this season. The Red Storm have a 10-1 record in non-conference games, coming up short only in a road game against a good Harvard team, and even then it was a five point game. Whatever downside there is to that loss is balanced out by clipping an Oklahoma State team that was ranked at the time and is still the first team just outside the AP top 25 heading into the new poll on Monday afternoon.

You’d think that would be good news for where the program is going this year…. but back on December 13th, they barely escaped a home game against Hofstra with a 63-60 victory. That was after they lost their Big East opener at home to Creighton and then trailed Providence by 16 (!) in the second half before pulling off a seven point win. That was before their most recent game, three days before Christmas. That one? An 85-48 loss on the road against Villanova. BartTorvik.com marks that as the worst performance of the season for the Johnnies by way of Game Score, beating out their previous low…. set in the Hofstra victory.

What went wrong against the Wildcats? For starters, VU shot just over 50% on three-pointers in that game. That’s always going to be hard to overcome, and STJ shooting 2-for-15 on triples didn’t help either. Mix in 21 turnovers, which works out to 30% of their possessions, and Joe Tartamella’s squad just never had a chance to put enough shots in the air to make a difference against Villanova’s onslaught.

St. John’s has a pair of double digit scorers in Brooke Moore and Sa’Mya Wyatt. They’ll get you 14.9 and 10.7 points per game respectively, and they’re the only women averaging more than 7.5 points per game, too. Marquette is going to be able to mostly speaking defend the two of them inside the arc. The 6’0” Moore can hit threes — she’s at 48% on the year — but she’s only trying 1.8 per game out of her team high 8.7 attempts per game. Wyatt is 1-for-4, so the Golden Eagles can mostly just ignore the 5’11” forward when she steps outside.

In fact, the Red Storm in general are going to try to score inside. They’re about middle of the country in three-point attempt rate, but they’re #11 in the country in two-point shooting percentage. Seven of their eight every game rotation players are shooting at least 55% on two-pointers this season, and it’s not like Daniela Abies is slacking off at 48.8%.

Breaking apart the St. John’s defense might be an interesting trick for Marquette. On one hand, BartTorvik.com ranks the Johnnies at #154 in the country in defensive efficiency. In theory, that’s going to be easy to score against. However, STJ is actually pretty decent at shooting defense and passable at rebounding. Where they fall apart is they don’t generate turnovers, coming close to ranking #300 in the country. They make up for the problem of usually letting a shot go in the air by making sure that the shot is a two-pointer. The Red Storm are #50 in the country in defensive three-point attempt rate. Marquette doesn’t shoot a metric ton of threes, so maybe that’s not the biggest problem in the world, but with the Golden Eagles shooting 39.3% behind the arc — #7 in the country! — it’s a thing that they can use to swing a game in their direction. Not allowing threes to go up helps St. John’s out because they don’t shoot that many themselves and they’re not that good at it as a team. If Marquette can get the ball moving and find Skylar Forbes, Lee Volker, and Jordan Meulemans (all north of 40 attempts, all north of 40%) open for shots, that can shake the Red Storm apart.

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