You can argue that Ross was better as a junior than he was as a sophomore….. but was it enough of a jump for a guy getting a spot in the starting lineup?
With the 2024-25 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’ll move along to a guy who kinda feels like he didn’t quite have the pop of a season that we might have expected to see………
Chase Ross
Junior — #2 — Guard — 6’5” — 210 lbs. — Dallas, Texas
*- notes a top 500 national ranking per KenPom.com
**- notes a top 325 national ranking per KenPom.com
***- notes a top 250 national ranking per KenPom.com
****- notes a top 110 national ranking per KenPom.com
WHAT WE SAID:
Reasonable Expectations
So if we know what we saw from Chase Ross: Marquette Starter a year ago, that gives us a solid spot to start to think about what to reasonably expect from him this season. Quite honestly: Marquette’s probably going to need more from him, and definitely much better shooting when he’s a starter. Maybe the minutes are okay, maybe that gives guys like Tre Norman, Zaide Lowery, and Damarius Owens a pathway to meaningful minutes, but the production’s going to have to boost up a bit. Without Tyler Kolek and Oso Ighodaro around to make the offense hum, Marquette’s going to have to muck it up a bit on both ends, and that certainly seems like a situation where Ross and his #107 steal rate in the country per KenPom.com last season can make a big impact.
How much more should we expect from Ross? It may be minutes dependent, but I honestly think that the BartTorvik.com algorithm is undershooting what Ross has to be on this team. The computer is spitting out 7.3 points, 3.8 rebounds, and 1.5 assists per game in about 26 minutes per night. That’s about what Ross was doing when he subbed in for Stevie Mitchell last December, but that was when he was playing with Kolek and Ighodaro. It’s one thing to fit into Mitchell’s role in the lineup, it’s another to play alongside Mitchell and be asked to do more than that.
Maybe that is what his ceiling on this team is given the other components around him, but I feel like not only will need more from Ross, but he’s going to do more than that, too.
Why You Should Get Excited
Last year, I thought there was a chance that Ross could jump past Stevie Mitchell into the starting lineup. There was enough similarity between the two in their per-40-minute numbers from 2022-23 that we could raise the point of which guy is better in the lineup for the Golden Eagles.
Now it seems that those two guys are going to play a pretty decent amount of minutes together. Let me ask you a question:
Do you like dunks?
Last year, Stevie Mitchell was #29 in the country in steal rate according to KenPom.com. That’s, uh, pretty good. What do you think he can accomplish when Chase Ross and his also very good steal rate is on the floor with him? What can Ross accomplish when he’s playing a lot with Mitchell?
How many “OH MY GOD CHASE ROSS IN TRANSITION!” dunks are we going to get out of this arrangement? How much of Marquette’s Goon Mentality is going to get these two guys to ratchet up their intensity when it comes to stacking up deflections? How miserable is it going to be to play in an opposing backcourt against these two?
Oh, and by the way? Chase Ross shot nearly 39% from long range in Big East play last season. What if a few more minutes per game gets him a little more comfortable with his shot and Ross can mix that skill along with an ability to get to the rim on the regular? It’s not completely crazy to think that Ross could end up in 2023-24 Kam Jones’ role as a scorer while Jones himself ends up in 2023-24 Tyler Kolek’s role as a creator and playmaker.
Plus the defense? Sounds terrifying, to be honest.
Potential Pitfalls
How much do you want to be worried about Chase Ross’ shoulder?
Here he is at the early August open practice with K-tape on the shoulder.
Here he is at practice in early October with a brace on the shoulder.
And here he is at practice in late October with what appears to be a compression sleeve going all the way up into his jersey.
Look, if there was something wrong with Ross, he wouldn’t be practicing or playing or whatever word you want to use there. Maybe this is all therapeutic more than anything else, maybe it’s for safety’s sake because Ross doesn’t need surgery at all and he’s just gotta heal up one day at a time and sitting him over this is silly.
But the Chase Ross we saw after he came back from his shoulder injury was definitely not the same kind of Chase Ross that we saw earlier in the season. If Ross is limited in some way, if he’s a liiiiiiiiittle bit hesitant about exacerbating his issues, how much defensive intensity does he lose? Last year, it seemed like it was kind of a lot based on what the on/off numbers tell us. If Ross isn’t quite getting stops the way that this year’s version of Marquette is going to need to get stops, that might mean that the coaching staff turns in another direction to find someone who can get it done.
At a glance, I think you could easily make the argument that Chase Ross was better in 2024-25 than he was the year before. In terms of raw numbers, he posted career bests in points, rebounds, assists, and steals, as well as field goal percentage and three-point percentage. If you look at his per-40-minutes numbers, he had career bests in points and assists, and he was a shade better in steals than the year before. If you look at the fancy stats, Ross had career bests all over the place: Offensive Rating, effective field goal percentage, true shooting percentage, offensive rebounding rate, assist rate, block rate, fouls called per 40 minutes, fouls drawn per 40 minutes. Sure, he technically had the worst turnover rate of his career, but anyone who says that a TO rate under 16% is bad should be dragged behind a car through a cactus field. Ross even played a bigger part on the team than the BartTorvik.com algorithm projected him to have before the season started.
So why am I left with the feeling that this was something of a disappointing season for the junior from Texas?
I think it’s partially because, for the second straight season, we have to create a carveout to forgive a little bit of how things went for Ross because of injury.
Ross had hand surgery in early April to correct ligament damage done on the road against DePaul in mid-January.
Ross, up to the game before that one: 10.9 points, 4.1 rebounds, 2.3 assists, 2.2 steals in 29.4 minutes per game, shooting splits of .492 overall, .400 from behind the three-point line, .780 from the free throw line.
Marquette was 14-2.
Ross, after that game: 9.9 points, 3.5 rebounds, 2.0 assists, 1.4 steals in 30.6 minutes per game; shooting splits of .452 overall, .347 from behind the three-point line, and .722 from the free throw line.
Marquette was 8-9.
Ross saw his production decline as his minutes went up after he damaged his hand bad enough to the point where yeah, he could play, but he was going to need off-season surgery.
To think about it a different way? KenPom.com provides splits for Conference Play, vs Top 100 opponents, and vs Top 50 opponents. At the very least, Ross’ numbers were down in very nearly every single category in each of the three splits compared to his full season numbers. For a lot of them — Offensive Rating is a perfect example here — Ross got worse as the competition ramped up.
115.3 Offensive Rating overall
110.5 ORtg in Big East regular season games (5 before the injury, 14 after)
106.6 ORtg vs Top 100 opponents (13 of the 23 games came after the injury, including the last six games of the season)
101.2 ORtg vs Top 50 opponents (9 of 15 came after the injury)
After the injury, Marquette went 7-2 when Ross had an Offensive Rating for the game over 100….. and 1-7 when his Offensive Rating was under 100. More specifically: His ORtg was under 93 in all seven of those losses and under 85 in four of them. 100 is a nice middle of the road number, think of it as 100 points per 100 possessions. That’s average.
As Marquette went 1-4 in their final five games of the season, Chase Ross didn’t post an ORtg better than 88 in the losses. 148 in the two point Big East tournament win over Xavier…. but not so hot everywhere else.
Up through the middle of January, we were seeing a pretty good version of Chase Ross. Definitely better than when we saw him starting during his sophomore season, very obviously better as a shooter from long range. After that? We were seeing a slightly struggling version of Chase Ross, at the very least a version that was struggling to continue to replicate the results from the first 16 games of the season….. and maybe, just maybe, it’s not a coincidence that the Golden Eagles were struggling to replicate their results in terms of wins and losses, too. The margins for error were never going to be terribly high for the team, and when we were only seeing about 85% of what Ross was doing early in the season, that wasn’t enough to get it done at the team level. It wasn’t bad by Chase….. just not up to the standard he had set for himself or what the team needed.
BEST GAME
I think this one’s pretty straight forward. In the very last game Ross played without that hand injury, he put up a career high 27 points (on 7-for-12 shooting!) and six steals as #7 ranked Marquette fell behind Georgetown by 14 points in the first half and then battled alllllllll the way back to win 74-66. Ross pulled Marquette even at 58 with under eight minutes to play and then snagged one of those steals in the last two minutes as the second stop in MU’s 8th and final kill of the game. In his free time, he grabbed three rebounds, handed out two assists, and blocked a shot.
SEASON GRADE
If you’re just reading a stat sheet, Ross was pretty good this season. He was definitely better than the Torvik algorithm projected him, although I think we all expected that to happen. It’s hard to truly find a hole in what he chipped into the team.
I don’t think we can really ding him for being slightly worse with a damaged hand, just noting that maybe he didn’t deliver on the season-long growth that might have been possible if he hadn’t wrecked his ligaments. Even with that injury, he was a perfectly acceptable Big East starter caliber player. It’s not entirely his fault that Marquette as a team rolled backwards after he got hurt, so I don’t really want to knock his score here because of that. We’re trying to evaluate Ross’ season, not what happened to the Golden Eagles. His season doesn’t feel great even if the stats were just fine, and his tail off at the same time MU went into a tailspin is probably the reason why.
I think I have to land on a 7 here? 8 is definitely too high, 6 feels too low, that would be more like “eh, just barely cleared the bar,” and I don’t think that’s really what happened with Ross this season.
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