Oso Ighodaro is nudging towards the top 10 senior seasons in program history.
By now, you should be more than familiar with our series of regularly updating leaderboards for various Marquette Golden Eagles sports accomplishments. Keep checking back to that link in the previous sentence for our charts as the seasons continue to churn through history and MU’s various teams continue to create new memories and accomplishments.
Let’s jump in and talk about the best shot blocking seasons by Marquette players during their senior season.
First of all, Jim McIlvaine’s 1993-94 senior year record is the single season record as well. That’s the best shot blocking season that the program has ever seen. It’s literally 50 more blocked shots than Mac’s second best season at Marquette. It’s that crazy. In a 30 game modern regular season, someone is going to have to average at least 4.8 blocks per game to beat that record.
And so we pay attention to the rest of the top 10, led by Faisal Abraham’s 84 swats in 1997. Kur Kuath in 2022 is the only other senior to ever record at least 60 blocks in a season, and there’s only been 5 senior seasons with at least 50 blocks. So there is space for someone to average just a little bit over a block per game and still go sailing into the top 10.
That’s where we get to Oso Ighodaro, who is averaging 1.2 blocks per game here in 2023-24. Through 25 games, Ighodaro has 31 blocks on the year, and that has him seven blocks away from passing Mike Bargen for #10 on the senior year list. Marquette has six regular season games left as I type this on the morning of the home game against DePaul as well as one guaranteed Big East tournament game. They’re also very close to being guaranteed to have at least one NCAA tournament game as well.
I think it’s a safe bet that Ighodaro gets past Bargen. Can he get to the 8th place tie between Walter Downing and Theo John with 40 blocks? Nine more between now and whenever the season ends? Maybe, and the longer that the Golden Eagles keep the postseason going, the easier it’s going to be for Ighodaro to etch his name into the top 10.
Here’s what the chart looks like after Marquette’s February 17th game against #1 UConn.