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.
Today, we’re going to talk about Marquette’s junior year assists record and the top 10 list overall.
Two of the top three spots in the Marquette junior year assists list are pretty wild, if you think about the process of how we got there. Think about this: In 1975, Lloyd Walton dished out 159 assists to set the all-time program record, and then, just four years later, Sam Worthen said “HEY WATCH THIS” and smashed Walton’s record by FIFTY ASSISTS, recording 209 helpers in 1979. That record then stood for 15 years! No one even got within 50 of Worthen for 15 years! That’s crazy!
And then do you know what happened?
Tony Miller broke Worthen’s record by SIXTY-FIVE ASSISTS. That’s crazy! The record went from 209 to 274! To make it even worse for Sam Worthen, that was the third straight year that Miller broke Worthen’s PROGRAM RECORD FOR ASSISTS IN A SEASON. Right???
So yeah, that’s where we were for a while with the junior year assists chart: Four of the 10 best assists seasons in program history making up the top four spots on the list, including Tony Miller’s single season record, no matter what year in college, as the junior year record.
And then we got to Tyler Kolek’s junior campaign.
Up until then, only Miller and Worthen had ever cracked the 200 assist mark as juniors. In fact, up until then, it was those two and Aaron Hutchins to crack 200 assists in any season. That’s how out there the junior year marks were.
That’s when Tyler Kolek said, hey, you know what? Leading the Big East at 5.9 assists per game was pretty neat, but I can do better. He averaged 7.5 helpers per game that year, and you have to wonder if he didn’t ding his hand up early against Vermont in the NCAA tournament (4 assists), maybe MU beats Michigan State (5 assists) in the second round, and that’s one more game that the Golden Eagles get to play… or even just Kolek gets to his average for the season.
Maybe that means he gets the five assists he needs to break Tony Miller’s junior year record, which is also the program’s single season record.
Alas, he fell four short while still becoming the third junior in program history to clear the 200 assist barrier… and just the second other than Miller to clear 250 as well.
If nothing else, this proves that Miller’s junior year record is touchable. Remember: That version of Tyler Kolek did not go into that season heralded as one of the best point guards in the country, and he nearly got the record. One day, Marquette is going to have a team and an offense and a junior point guard that finds their way to 275 assists in a season. Maybe that requires a deeper postseason run than a second round appearance in the NCAA tourney, maybe that requires 8 assists a game.
One day, it’s gonna happen, we’re just going to have to wait and see.
Here’s the all-time junior year chart at the end of the 2025-26 season.
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