Marquette Women’s Basketball Preview: at DePaul & vs Butler

I’ve made two choices with this preview.

The first is that I am not going to do a Where Are We Now? post for Big East women’s basketball. The fact of the matter is that everyone in the league is somewhere between four and eight games played right now. That’s not exactly a lot of time to do a check in on everyone’s season. If I wait until Christmas, when Marquette has nothing but conference games left to go, then the Golden Eagles will have played 12 games. That’s a much better time to check in with the Big East, even if MU will be three games into the league schedule by then.

The second is I’m going ahead and smashing together two game previews for the price of one. It’s the first two games of Big East play both for Marquette and for the Golden Eagles’ two opponents, and the games are just three days apart. It’s not like that much is going to change between Thursday night after the first game and Sunday morning, and that’s part of it, too. If I do two separate previews, then I have to have the Sunday one up on the site by noon on Saturday by my very silly personal standards for when I want these things published. So that would be 30 hours between “wake up on Friday” and “publish on Saturday” and I don’t want to do that.

As far as the actual output of Cara Consuegra’s basketball team goes, it seems to me that this is a very nice spot in the schedule to attack what appears to be two very winnable games for the Golden Eagles. The Golden Eagles are 4-3 on the year right now, with all three losses coming against quality opponents but only one of the victories can say the same thing. MU started the year at #53 in the BartTorvik.com computer rankings, but they’ve fallen to #66 following Sunday’s loss to Gonzaga. The NET debuted for the season on Monday morning, and Marquette’s starting point there is #99. MU was at #39 in the Her Hoop Stats rankings after opening day, and now they’re down to #77.

Things could be going better is what I’m saying, particularly for a basketball team that came into the year only adding pieces to their rotation from last season and with expectations to be a little bit better than they were last season. However, part of the story of what the Golden Eagles were last season is that they went 12-6 in Big East play — 12-4 against Not UConn — and that’s where the optimism for this season came from.

Maybe, in that case, it’s good news for Marquette to jump into the place where they built optimism last year: Big East action. Even better: It certainly looks like these are two games that Marquette could/should win, especially if the Golden Eagles are thinking of themselves as an NCAA tournament team this year. That’s going to take some work between now and March, but there’s no time like the present to get started on that.

Big East Game #1: at DePaul Blue Demons (2-6)

Date: Thursday, December 4, 2025Time: 8pm CentralLocation: Wintrust Arena, Chicago, IllinoisStreaming: PeacockLive Stats: Stat BroadcastTwitter Updates: @MarquetteWBB Bluesky Updates: @AnonymousEagle

Marquette is 39-49 all time against DePaul. The Blue Demons have controlled the series 23-21 since the two teams have joined the Big East, but the Golden Eagles have won nine of the last 10 and each of the last seven in a row.

We have to give DePaul credit for what they have done with their non-conference schedule. Good for them for scheduling teams like UNLV and Princeton, who are very high quality mid-major teams. Good for them for scheduling local and local-ish teams like Bradley, Northwestern, and Loyola Chicago, especially with the first two rolling around in the 100s in the BartTorvik.com rankings. They went out and challenged themselves, and that’s commendable.

The problem is that DePaul probably wasn’t going to be very good this year, starting off the campaign at #127 in the Torvik rankings, and that’s how they lost to every single team I just listed, plus Northern Colorado, too. Yeah, it’s real bad in Jill Pizzotti’s first year as full time head coach.

DePaul’s issues are wide ranging. They don’t do anything remarkable on offense, and they’re objectively awful at getting to the free throw line…. which isn’t terrible big picture, because they’re shooting under 60% from the stripe. They do provoke turnovers at a near elite level, getting one more than 29% of the time, which is #28 in the country according to BartTorvik.com. That’s a big problem for Marquette, seeing as three of their starters have a TO% north of 24%. The catch here is that DePaul is one of the worst defensive rebounding teams in the country, ranking south of #300 for the time being. Marquette struggles at offensive rebounding, especially in their starting five, so this could be a game where there’s an advantage to getting some minutes for Charia Smith and Jada Bediako to tear it up on the glass.

Marquette will have to worry about defending Katie Novik and Natiah Nelson. Those two are DePaul’s only double digit scorers, although Ally Timm is sitting at nine per game right now. Both Novik and Timm are prepared to fire away from beyond the arc, especially Timm, who averages a team high 37.8% on a team high 5.6 attempts per game.

Big East Game #2: vs Butler Bulldogs (4-4)

Date: Sunday, December 7, 2025Time: Noon CentralLocation: Al McGuire Center, Milwaukee, WisconsinStreaming: ESPN+Live Stats: Stat BroadcastTwitter Updates: @MarquetteWBB Bluesky Updates: @AnonymousEagle

Marquette is 23-10 all time against Butler. The first ever meeting was in 1986, and like all of the first four, the Bulldogs came away victorious. Since 1991, Marquette has lost just six times, but the sixth time was last February in Indianapolis, snapping a 10 game winning streak by the Golden Eagles.

This probably wasn’t going to be a fun year for Butler after the roster emptied out when last season ended. Head coach Austin Parkinson had a bunch of seniors he knew he was going to lose, but then also lost pretty much the entire rest of his rotation, so this year’s squad was kind of assembled on the fly. Taking that into account, things are going pretty well for Butler. Three of their four losses are to top 80 opponents, with two of those coming away from Hinkle Fieldhouse. Could have lost those if they had a veteran experienced team, so the only problem there is getting pasted by 19 at Indiana and by 26 over the weekend on a neutral floor by Georgia. Butler probably really wishes they had either the Columbia game (home overtime loss to Torvik #79) or the Central Michigan (home nine point loss to Torvik #135) back, but that’s how things go in the first couple of weeks of a team coming together.

If Marquette wants to start off their 10 Big East home games with a win, they’re going to have to buckle up on the defensive side of the ball. Butler is a very good shooting team, ranking in the 50s in both two-point and three-point shooting percentage. Those two combine to put them into the top 50 in the country in effective field goal percentage, so forcing bad shots will be important. BU doesn’t get second chances all that much — perhaps by design? — so making it awkward or rushed will be big helps on that end of the floor.

Butler has good team shooting numbers, but those are being carried by three women. Lilly Zeinstra — BU’s only double digit scorer — is knocking down over 47% of her team high 4.3 attempts per game and she plays a team high 31 minutes a night. Anna Wypych comes off the bench for 15 minutes, but still finds time to shoot 2.5 three-pointers on average, and half of those are going down so far this year. Mallory Miller starts alongside Zeinstra, and she’s shooting 35% from long range on 2.1 tries per game. No one else is north of 32%, which does create a certain amount of difficulty in keeping track of who needs to be glued to on defense and who you can cheat off of into the lane a little bit.

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