The Marquette Golden Eagles offseason is in full swing after they lost to the New Mexico Lobos in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. The Golden Eagles will be losing Kam Jones, David Joplin, and Stevie Mitchell because of graduation and it will be huge losses for the basketball program for the 2025-2026 college basketball season.
There will be three new starters in the starting lineup next season for head coach Shaka Smart. There is also another player that will be leaving the program and it is Al Amadou. Smart is going to have to find a way to fill out the roster for the 2025-2026 college basketball season. He may have to go an unfamiliar route and use the transfer portal next season.
Marquette Golden Eagles Al Amadou Enters the Transfer Portal
It seems very rare for a Marquette player under Smart to hit the transfer portal. Well, Amadou has decided that he is going to be entering the transfer portal. Brewtown Andy of www.anonymouseagle.com wrote about why Amadou possibly decided to enter the portal. He said,
“But, sometimes, an announcement of a transfer is an unsurprising last car on a train of information. That’s kind of how I feel about Thursday’s news that Marquette men’s basketball forward Al Amadou has entered the transfer portal.
Amadou came to Marquette as a part of the 2023 recruiting class alongside Caedin Hamilton, Zaide Lowery, and Tre Norman. Amadou appeared in 14 games for a total of 52 minutes in the 2023-24 season, and played the part of The World’s Best Teammate. Most of his minutes came alongside the walk ons and Amadou was consistently going out of his way to bust his butt to give the walk ons their best chance to shine. At the end of the season, I didn’t even give him a grade on his first campaign in blue and gold because it’s unfair to judge 52 minutes of action that way.
As Marquette prepared for the 2024-25 season, it apparently became clear to head coach Shaka Smart that the best path forward for Amadou was to spend the year on the bench as a redshirt. Given that we did not find out that was going to be the case until after Marquette’s season opener, it certainly seems like that was a late call by Smart and his staff in cooperation with Amadou. I said at the time, in the wake of seeing Royce Parham’s debut against Stony Brook, that it appeared that the issue was more than Parham had jumped Amadou on the depth chart than anything else.
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