Was it the best 40 minutes of basketball that you’ve ever seen from Marquette men’s basketball? Not even close.
But it was a win, 79-69, over Radford at Fiserv Forum on Monday night, and MU is now 1-0 in Shaka Smart’s second season on the sidelines.
Here’s the good news: Marquette never trailed, opening up the season 17 seconds in with a Kam Jones three-pointer. In fact, Radford never even tied it, and after some standard early back-and-forth, they never even got closer than three points the entire rest of the game. If we broke it down — I’m not going to for this recap, feel free to do it and post in the comments — I suspect that Marquette was winning by double digits more often than not even though the lead didn’t get to 10 for the first time until the 3:21 mark of the first half.