The 2026-27 college basketball season is right around the corner, so let’s dive into the Marquette men’s basketball roster and take a look at what to expect from each player this season. Going forward in these Player Previews, we’ll be going in this order: The two freshmen going in alphabetical order by last name then doing the same for the three transfers, then moving on to the redshirt freshmen. After that, it’s the seven players returning from last year’s roster going in order of average minutes played per game last season.
We’re going to organize our thoughts about the upcoming season as it relates to each player into categories, as we always do:
- Reasonable Expectations
- Why You Should Get Excited
- Potential Pitfalls
With that out of the way, we swing the camera around to the sophomore who suddenly found himself in the starting lineup after nine games of his freshman year…..
Adrien Stevens
Sophomore — — Guard — 6’4″ — 215 lbs. — Potomac, Maryland
The 2025-26 season for Adrien Stevens can kind of be summed up this way: “Hey, freshman, can you do this for us? How about this? Can we add this? What about this? Okay, hotshot, how about this? You handled all of that, huh?”
He started out the year playing real rotation minutes right out of the gate, never dipping into single digit minutes. He found his way into the starting lineup when the coaching staff needed a new face to take charge of one of the backcourt/wing positions. He got comfortable as a pillar of strength in the lineup, and by the end of the season, Stevens had kind of quietly turned into one of the more reliable backcourt presences in the entire Big East.
If you just take his season long stats — 7.9 points, 2.6 rebounds, 1.6 assists, 1.4 steals, 37.5% three-point shooting, 57.4% two-point shooting — you say “hey, that’s a heck of a freshman season for anyone, to be honest.” But if you take his stats from just Marquette’s final 13 games of the season, when the team looked like they were a competent and competitive Big East club, you get this: 10.8 points, 3.3 rebounds, 2.1 assists, 2.2 steals, 37.7% from deep, 55.6% inside the arc. That’s a good season for any guard playing in a conference on the level of the Big East.
If you want to quibble with my evaluation there, that’s fine, but it’s hard to argue about these numbers from just conference play, according to KenPom.com: in the league in effective field goal percentage, in true shooting percentage, in steal rate, and in three-point shooting percentage.
The fact of the matter is that by the end of the 2025-26 season, Adrien Stevens proved he belonged on the court for whatever playing time the coaching staff threw at him. It felt like they kept stacking responsibilities on him, and he just kept shouldering that burden and proving again and again that he was ready for whatever job was at hand.
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Reasonable Expectations
That brings us to this year, and trying to figure out what’s reasonable to expect from Adrien Stevens. I think growing from his overall freshman year numbers is probably a safe bet, which is why I think we’ll probably see more from him than what the BartTorvik.com computers are spitting out as a projection. 9.9 points, 3.2 rebounds, and 1.8 assists in 69% of MU’s minutes, which works out to 27.6 minutes per game. That would be an improvement on his season long stats from last year, so I get why the algorithm is coming up with that for him. One of the best things about freshmen is that they become sophomores, after all, and growing from his overall numbers makes sense.
But those numbers are a step back from what Stevens was doing late in the year, when Marquette was playing at their best.
I think it might be a little bit much to ask Stevens to grow forward from that 13 game end of the season sample, at least in terms of a reasonable expectation. The safe and generally accepted assumption is that this roster looks like it’s going to provide better results for the Golden Eagles this season. If that’s the case, then Stevens et. al. has more help on the court, so that makes it possible that he doesn’t have to do quite as much. That’s why doing more than that 11/3/2/2 line might be a little bit too far.
Asking Stevens to keep it there as a season average, though? With the quality shooting inside and outside the arc? That feels like it’s a reasonable ask after a better than expected freshman season.
Why You Should Get Excited
We know that Adrien Stevens is going to stay in the starting lineup after getting the nod 23 times last season.
But is he going to have the same role on the floor?
That would be the easy move for head coach Shaka Smart and his staff: Keep Stevens doing what he proved he could do well and find another source to replace the departure of Chase Ross from the starting lineup. What if the move is to slide Stevens over to what Ross was doing on the floor last year and find someone else — say, Damarius Owens and his self-proclaimed Fun Stopper role — to take up the more glue-guy type of job that Stevens had last year.
The vibe coming out of the open scrimmage in early October was that Stevens was looking to attack the rim more than he was last year. He got nine of his 22 field goal attempts (41%) in his two games played on the Canada trip inside the arc after getting less than 30% of his tries there last season. His field goal attempts against Green Bay in the exhibition game were split evenly, two each, and thanks to getting to the line for six free throw attempts, he finished with 12 points in just 22 minutes. That’s a 21.8 points per 40 minute clip after Stevens was at just 12.2 per 40 last season.
What if the coaching staff is going to ask Stevens to take on a new role with this revamped roster, and what if he just keeps succeeding at taking on new responsibilities, just like he did all of last season? What if we take Chase Ross’ shooting attempt numbers from last season and just port them over to Adrien Stevens’ shooting percentages? The same number of three-pointers, give or take, but about five more two-point attempts per game, but falling at a 57% clip instead of under 50%? What does that do for Stevens’ scoring numbers, and what is Marquette’s ceiling if that works out like that?
Potential Pitfalls
May we all be blessed with the problem of “#132 prospect in the 247 Sports Composite is just a competent Big East Starter by the end of his freshman year.”
That’s about the worst of it, right? Adrien Stevens just keeps turning up for his shift at the Basketball Factory, punching his time card, and spends two hours putting together 9/3/2 lines, right? There’s nothing wrong with that, that’s great, happy to have it from anyone. It would just be kind of a bummer to watch his development as a player stagnate as “perfectly good quality starting guard” and that’s it after just one season of college hoops.
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