Alrighty, Marquette men’s soccer got a Big East win last weekend. It’s their first since beating Butler 2-0 on Saturday, September 28, 2024. That’s a run of 0-9-2 that got broken up with the 4-1 victory over DePaul and the Golden Eagles scored a total of five goals in those 11 matches.
That’s bad.
Anyway, season’s still broken, but at least MU isn’t the worst team in the Big East standings any more. That’s DePaul, as they are still winless at 0-5-1.
Marquette’s opponent this weekend? An incredibly desperate
Akron team that sits three points back of the lead in the Midwest Division and tied for the second of two wild card spots in the Big East tournament. Oh, and the Zips are ranked, too? Sure, great, what fun.
Big East Match #7: at #20 Akron Zips (9-3-3, 3-2-1 Big East)
Date: Saturday, November 1, 2025
Time: 5pm Central
Location: FirstEnergy Stadium, Akron, Ohio
Streaming: ESPN+, maybe?
Live Stats: Sidearm Stats
Twitter Updates: @MarquetteSoccer
Marquette is 1-9-5 all time against Akron. MU was winless in the first 12 encounters with the Zips between 1980 and 1998, and then the two were drawn into an NCAA tournament match in 2013. That’s Marquette’s lone win in the series, and it remains Marquette’s lone NCAA tournament victory in program history.
Akron comes in undefeated in their last four matches, including a scoreless draw with then-#13 Cornell up in New York. The Zips are coming off a 3-1 win over Xavier where they had a 2-0 lead in the 33rd minute and then tacked on an insurance goal to back up two in the 60th. They’re outscoring teams 24-10 on the year, partially because they’re doubling teams up on shots per match at 14.2 vs 7.3. Even if you do get a shot off, it’s probably kind of lousy, as they’re holding opponents to less than 39% of their shots on frame. That’s actually better than Akron’s rate, but essentially they make it so hard to get a shot off, you take whatever you can get and a lot of the time, it’s kind of lousy.
Mission #1 to avoid this running out of control in a hurry is slowing down Stefan Dobrijevic. He is far and away Akron’s top offensive threat with team highs in goals (6), assists (9), and points (21). That’s the best assists total in the Big East this season, but Dobrijevic is running 10 points behind Georgetown’s Zach Zengue for the league lead there. We should probably mention Jack Roman here. Dobrijevic is Akron’s most productive threat, but Roman’s pretty active. He has just three fewer shots on the season than Dobrijevic, but that’s only — lol, I said “only” — turned into five goals.
Mitch Budler is probably going to be named Big East Goalkeeper of the Year in about 10 days. He has the best goals-against average in the league at just 0.67, and his save percentage of .762 is good enough to give him the edge on the two guys better than him there. The big advantage on the GAA is that Akron just doesn’t allow shots, but Budler’s on top of the ones he needs to worry about.
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