Chase Ross got to the rim a lot this season. Got there. Made the shots? welllllll…….. | Mar 11, 2026; New York, NY, USA; Marquette Golden Eagles guard Chase Ross (2) shoots past Xavier Musketeers defense during the first half at Madison Square Garden. Mandatory Credit: Robert Deutsch-Imagn Images

With the 2025-26 season long since in the books, let’s take a few moments to look back at the performance of each member of YOUR Marquette Golden Eagles this year. While we’re at it, we’ll also take a look back at our player previews and see how our preseason prognostications stack up with how things actually played out. We’ll run through the roster in order of total minutes played going from lowest to highest, and today we wrap up our player reviews with an assessment of what happened with Marquette’s senior guard…..

Chase Ross

Senior — #2 — Guard — 6’5” — 210 lbs. — Dallas, Texas

Games	Min	FGM	FGA	FG%	3PTM	3PA	3P%	FTM	FTA	FT%	OReb	DReb	Reb	Ast	Stl	Blk	Fouls	Pts
32	33.0	4.8	11.3	42.1%	1.2	4.0	29.5%	3.5	4.8	72.3%	0.5	3.6	4.2	3.4	2.3*	0.2	2.3	14.3

ORtg	%Poss	%Shots	eFG%	TS%	OR%	DR%	ARate	TORate	Blk%	Stl%	FC/40	FD/40	FTRate
103.1	23.5%	22.8%	47.4%	52.2%	1.8%	12.7%	20.2%**	16.1%	0.7%	3.9%****	2.9	4.5**	42.7%***

* — Notes the best average in the Big East
** — Notes a top 500 national ranking per KenPom.com
*** — Notes a top 400 national ranking per KenPom.com
**** — Notes a top 50 national ranking per KenPom.com

WHAT WE SAID:

Reasonable Expectations

I hate doing this to anyone, but we have to start at the level of “Chase Ross has to to do more than last year if Marquette’s going to have an obviously successful season.” He’s probably not going to play more than the 30 minutes per game he averaged in 2024-25, so he’s just going to have to cram more into those 30 minutes. That’s going to mean attempting more than 7.4 field goals per game, which was a career high. The good news? That was just 9.7 per 40 minutes, and that was only 0.7 higher than his career best there, which he set in his freshman season. It’s going to be easy for him to take shots at a higher rate this season, given the vacuum of obvious scoring threats on this roster.

The more is going to have to be across the board, so: More than 10.5 points, more than 3.8 rebounds (although that one might not need to be too much more), more than 2.1 assists (again, maybe not too much more). Asking a guy who was #107 in steal rate in each of the past two seasons to find a way to get more than 1.8 steals is probably a little past the edge of what’s reasonable.

BartTorvik.com’s projection algorithm seems to be on our side here: 14.1 points, 4.2 rebounds, 2.3 assists in 32 minutes per game. It’s not A LOT more, just more than last year. It’s also showing Ross projected at a career high usage rate — sure, that’s what taking more shots is called — but the computer shows him coming a little bit down from a career best offensive rating and ultimately landing on the same PORPAGATU! which is essentially “efficiency at that usage.” This is all fine, I think.

Why You Should Get Excited

The Big East coaches voted Chase Ross as one of the seven best players in the Big East going into this season. If that holds until they vote again in March, then this will have been a good season for Marquette. In short, you should be excited for great things from Chase Ross because great things for Chase Ross means everyone else is going to have an easier time contributing. Great Chase Ross has a gravity well that shifts defenses away from his teammates, and that means more open threes for Ben Gold and Zaide Lowery, it means more cuts to the rim for Lowery and Sean Jones, and so on and so forth.

Let’s go one step further.

If Ross is clearly one of the best players in the league when we get to March, as defined as “obvious All-Big East First Team pick,” then we are not that far from asking exactly how close can Chase Ross get to Big East Player of the Year attention?

Think about it: What if Ross is clearly Marquette’s best player and Marquette is clearly outplaying their preseason poll spot of fifth in the Big East, say easily in the top three? Ross has to at least be in the conversation at that point, and if something slides sideways with both Creighton (no Ryan Kalkbrenner on defense) and Providence (Kim English still coaching), it’s going to be pretty easy to get the Golden Eagles into that position, especially if Chase Ross is doing better than the stat line we laid out in the Expectations section.

Potential Pitfalls

I have written 12 Player Previews for this season, this is #13. All 12 of them, I had logical, thought out reasons as to why things miiiiight not quite work out for the best for each of the guys on Marquette’s roster this season. They were all on-court reasons, whether that was maybe their role doesn’t come together or there’s just not minutes for them or something else.

I didn’t mention one particular thing about any of the other guys on the roster, even though there’s something looming as a possibility for all of them. Mentioning that thing would be jinxing them, and that’s mean and uncalled for.

But with Chase Ross, the fact of the matter is that we can not assess his career to this point without discussing the fact that he spent the back half of each of the past two seasons nursing notable injuries. As such: We have to raise the possibility that something is going to ding Ross out of his best possible version yet again this year. We’re all thinking it! I’m not being jinxy here! I mentioned the injuries up at the top! It’s a thing that we have to worry about with Ross!

Also there’s the “what if he’s not an A-1 top line player” thing. With as many questions as Marquette has going into this season, Chase Ross not ringing the bell on a step forward — not a leap, just a step — would exacerbate pretty much every single other question facing the Golden Eagles.

If we’re being honest about it, everything was going great.

Thanks to BartTorvik.com’s player pages, we have a handy dandy graph with Chase Ross’ Offensive Ratings for every game of the 2025-26 season. Thanks to the graph, we can easily see that through Marquette’s first nine games, Ross had an ORtg of at least 130 or better in six of the nine. He was north of 100 in two of the other three, and I’m more than willing to allow a little bit of grace and say “eh, he’s not perfect, over 100 is still fine.” Even with an actual bad day against Dayton — ORtg of just 86.0 thanks to a 5-for-14 shooting night and four turnovers — Ross had an Offensive Rating of 124.6 after Marquette’s first game of the month of December.

Eight of the first nine games with an Offensive Rating over...

Anonymous Eagle

Message History

Delivery option(s)