The Big East finally had a good night

Marquette looked great and the Big East finally blew some bad teams out

Photo credit: Associated Press

There was one of the all-time telling sequences late in Marquette’s 76-58 win over Purdue Tuesday night. Marquette was already winning, and the only remaining stakes were whether Kam Jones would get the one assist he needed to finish with the third triple-double in program history, the first since Dwyane Wade in late March 2003. And he got it: Jones flipped a looping pass from the logo to Stevie Mitchell in the opposite corner, and Mitchell buried the shot, and the Fiserv Forum went ballistic, rightfully so.

Then Purdue came back down the other end. In normal circumstances, a layup here is a given. Everyone is celebrating the milestone; the game is completely over and has been for a while; just let the other guys score and grab the ball out of the net and run out the clock. But no. Instead, Ben Gold, in keeping with the pattern of the previous 40 minutes, blocked Trey Kaufman-Renn’s perfunctory attempt. Fiserv somehow got louder.

That is the stuff good teams do: No easy buckets, no possessions off, no matter what the circumstances or the opponent or the score. After the game, Shaka Smart talked most intently about his team’s defense, about how it could have done more to keep Purdue from getting into its actions, as if it hadn’t just swarmed an undeniably good offensive team, one led by Braden Smith, into one of the least effective nights it will have all year.

It was the perfect symbolic cap to the first unequivocally good evening for the Big East of the 2024-25 campaign — a night the league desperately needed to have.