The Marquette Men’s Basketball Sophomore Year Blocks Chart

Okay, that’s not sophomore year Oso, but you get the idea. | Photo by Mitchell Layton/Getty Images

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.

This time around, we’re going to look at blocked shots by a Marquette sophomore men’s basketball player.

We have to start with the fact that three of the 13 best shot blocking seasons in Marquette history have been squared away by sophomores. I don’t quite think we can say that Jim McIlvaine’s sophomore year record — which is third best for any season and for Mac himself — is an untouchable record here. Theo John got within 16 during his sophomore campaign, and that number itself is now the eighth best total for any season by any player. John only played in 48.7% of Marquette’s minutes that season, just 19.7 per game. He had a top 20 in the country block rate that year. If there’s ever a Marquette sophomore who can block shots at that rate and play 73% of the minutes — a 50% increase! — then in theory, that’s a 105 block season by increasing John’s 70 by 50% as well. That’s not even what’s needed to break McIlvaine’s record, and all I did was boost playing time to imagine the possibilities here.

Chris Otule is the other sophomore who has a top 13 block total, and his is in a three-way tie for 11th best which thus extends down to 13th. Luke Fischer has an interesting case as the most underrated sophomore blocks season in Marquette history. He got to 53 in 2014-15, but remember: That was the season where Fischer had to sit out til the end of the fall semester because of when he transferred in from Indiana. He averaged 2.2 blocks per game that year, so if he had played in Marquette’s first eight games at that rate, that’s another 17 blocks, give or take. That would be 70, even with John for second best in MU sophomore history and 8th best in any season.