Marquette University Athletics
Marquette meets Dayton Friday in NCAA First Round
3/14/2018 12:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
Game Center | WatchESPN
MILWAUKEE -- The BIG EAST Conference co-regular season champion Marquette University women's basketball team will make its 11th NCAA Championship this weekend in Louisville, Kentucky.
The Golden Eagles (23-9) have earned the No. 8 seed in the Lexington Region and will face ninth-seeded Dayton on Friday, March 16 at 1:30 p.m. Central time at the KFC Yum! Center. The advancing squad will take on the winner of the NCAA First Round game between top-seeded Louisville and 16-seed Boise State.
The game will air on ESPN2 in its entirety in the Milwaukee area, all other areas will be subject to whip-around coverage. Streaming is available on the WatchESPN app and Beth Mowins and Nell Fortner will be calling the action.
Marquette reached the BIG EAST Tournament championship game for the second year in a row, where it fell to DePaul after earning a share of its first BIG EAST regular season title.
The Golden Eagles are led by an experienced junior class that features BIG EAST Player of the Year Allazia Blockton and fellow Wisconsinites Natisha Hiedeman and Amani Wilborn. Blockton sports an 18.7 point per game scoring average and is the team's second-leading rebounder with 6.3 boards per contest. She is also among the team leaders in field goal (.520), free throw (.861) and 3-point percentage (.376) as well as assists (2.8 per game).
The Golden Eagles have outscored their opponents by 10 points per game and went 15-3 during BIG EAST action after suffering a string of narrow non-conference losses to Notre Dame (overtime), Tennessee (overtime, Michigan, Green Bay and New Mexico.
Wilborn (honorable mention) and fellow junior Erika Davenport (second team) joined Blockton with BIG EAST postseason accolades, while head coach Carolyn Kieger is the BIG EAST Co-Coach of the Year.
Dayton (23-6) went 15-1 in Atlantic 10 Conference play and at one point had won 16 straight games before an 85-72 loss at Saint Louis in the regular season finale on Feb. 24. The Flyers fell to George Washington in the A-10 semifinals and are making their eighth trip to the NCAA tournament in the last nine years. They also played in last year's tournament in Louisville, where they fell in the first round to fifth-seeded Tennessee as the No. 12 seed.
Senior guard Jenna Burdette leads four players averaging double figures with 16.1 points per game, while Javonna Layfield sits fourth in NCAA Division I with 12.9 rebounds per game (also 12.1 points to average a double-double).
Burdette, an All-Atlantic 10 First Team performer, is third nationally in 3-point percentage (.468) and paces a squad that hits a combined 38.4 percent from deep (13th nationally). Head coach Shauna Green earned A-10 Coach of the Year honors for the second straight season and has gone 55-16 in her first two seasons at the helm.
Marquette is 14-12 in 26 previous meetings with their former conference rivals and have claimed 12 of the last 14 matchups in the series. MU and UD were each members of the North Star, Midwestern Collegiate and Great Midwest conferences.
It is the first time since the 1998-99 and 1999-00 campaigns that the Golden Eagles have made consecutive trips to the NCAA tournament. The 1999-00 season also capped a string of three straight years in the Big Dance.
The Golden Eagles are 4-10 all-time in the NCAA tournament and fell in the 2017 first round to No. 12 Quinnipiac in Coral Gables, Florida. Marquette has never advanced past the second round but has won a game in three of its last four tournament trips.
The Golden Eagles are 1-2 as a No. 8 seed, last besting No. 9 Texas, 68-65, in the 2011 first round before narrowly falling to No. 1 Tennessee, 79-70, in the second round.
