Butler Basketball: No more remnants of the Final Four

I know I have not posted on the blog for a few months, but I have been writing numerous articles every week for a FanSided website called West Coast Convo.  I have still been watching a fair amount of Butler Bulldogs games, and I even went to the Butler vs. St. John's game at MSG in person.  This has not been an easy season for the Bulldogs, but I have confident that they will be better next season with a healthy Roosevelt Jones.  It wasn't easy to see the suspensions to Elijah Brown, Rene Castro, and even Kam Woods.  It wasn't any easier to have Rene Castro leave the program.  All of the turmoil definitely hurt the public's perception of Brandon Miller, but as he was on Illinois' staff in 2012-13, he knows what adversity is and he knows how to overcome it.

Anyways, the purpose of this article is mainly to talk about Khyle Marshall, whose contribution to Butler cannot be defined with some statistics.  Sure, he led the 2011 NCAA Tournament in offensive rebounds, but he's become a more complete player since then.  At the time, he was Matt Howard's understudy, and big things were expected of a highly recruited Marshall.  While he may not have lived up to Howard's career, he was a steady leader for Butler over the last few years.  He remained positive during a difficult 2011-12 season, and during the fantastic 2012-13 season, where he had to give up a fair amount of his playing at power forward to the emerging Kameron Woods.  And if you ask, me Khyle Marshall, not Kellen Dunham, was Butler's most valuable player this season.  While Dunham slumped during the second half of the season as defenses keyed on him the way they hadn't the year before when he was Rotnei Clarke's sidekick, Marshall remained productive throughout.  He shot over 50% in each of the last 6 games of the season.

Marshall had to be a senior leader as the only player left who played meaningful minutes on a Final Four team (I believe Erik Fromm played a grand total of 4 seconds in the 2011 NCAA Tournament).  I know he had an impact on Andrew Chrabascz the similar to the one Matt Howard had on him, which is why I am confident that Chrabascz will have a great sophomore season.  Looking forward, I have every reason to believe that a starting lineup of Barlow/Dunham/Jones/Chrabascz/Woods will be more competitive in the Big East next season.

I do not know how often I will be able to update this blog at this point, but I wanted to get this one post done to talk about my opinion on the state of the program and the loss of an excellent player.