#1 — How does head coach Jake Richard guide his team through what is clearly going to be a mentally and/or emotionally difficult season?
Back in September, Marquette men’s lacrosse lost Scott Michaud and Noah Snyder as both young men were killed in a traffic accident near campus. Two more players — they’ve never been identified, that’s fine — were also hospitalized as a result of injuries from the crash. Saturday’s opener against Michigan will be the team’s first official game since then. I’m sure that’s going to be a whole thing with a moment of silence and tons and tons of parents present, perhaps even more than there normally is,
and it could easily turn into an incredibly emotionally charged moment.
This kind of thing could repeat itself more than once as the season goes along as players bump into other players that they know from club team competition or high school, and it’s the first time that the guys are seeing each other since September. Could be the same thing with coaches, and I’m sure that there’s going to be more than one conversation this season between Jake Richard and his opposing head coach about how Richard is dealing with all of this as the season goes along.
It’s going to be a lot to deal with on Saturday for sure, and perhaps all season long. Richard is going to have to find a way to get his team through all of this, and it’s probably not going to be fun.
At least in terms of day to day operation of the team, they’ve been having meetings and fall practices and even their exhibition contests at the Naval Academy against Navy and Virginia. Richard and his players have been through a certain level of dealing with Noah and Scott not being present already for the past four months, and day-by-day, that makes dealing with their grief a little bit easier.
#2 — How does Marquette improve in Jake Richard’s second season in charge?
I don’t think we can perhaps quite get to calling Richard’s first year as Marquette head coach (and his first year as a Division 1 head coach!) an unqualified success. There was obviously some tremendous upside to how things went, seeing as Marquette won seven games for the first time since Joe Amplo won his second straight Big East tournament title back in 2017. That was also the last time that Marquette finished at .500 or better before Richard got the Golden Eagles to 7-7 last year, and that means 2025 was the first time that Marquette had finished the regular season with a winning record (7-6) since 2016 when Amplo’s Golden Eagles were 9-4 going into the Big East tournament.
There was still space for improvement last season. Marquette let a home game against #14 Georgetown get away from them in double overtime. That was made worse by effectively no-showing their next game, a 14-2 loss to Providence where MU trailed 4-0 at the end of the first quarter, 6-1 at halftime, and 11-1 heading to the fourth. Then they gave up three goals in a 41 second span to go from up two on Villanova with 2:15 left to down 14-13 with 90 seconds left before losing with that as the final score. That set Marquette up to need to beat Denver in the regular season for the first time in program history in order to get into the Big East tournament, WHICH THEY DID, but SHEESH, it should not have come to that.
There’s a lot of ways to answer this question. Is it closer attention to fine details? Is it improved offensive efficiency? Is it nastier defense? Is it winning more faceoffs? I could keep going for a while, but mostly that’s just because you want to see a program get better in the second year of a head coaching tenure. It’s just a matter of how they do that, and how much they actually improve.
#3 —Is Marquette going to beat a ranked team for the second time since 2019?
Because Marquette scored a 12-11 victory over #5 Penn State in 2023, I have to phrase this question slightly differently. Don’t get me wrong, going 0-10 against ranked opponents over the past two years is zero fun, it’s just that “since 2023” just doesn’t sound like that long of a time frame.
In any case, four teams on Marquette’s schedule are in the preseason Inside Lacrosse media top 20, including both of their first two opponents. There are also three teams on the schedule merely earning votes in the preseason poll, which means that those squads are a couple of nice wins and a couple of losses by ranked teams away from earning their way into the poll by the time Marquette lines up against them.
Beating a ranked team is no guarantee of anything other than you came out ahead at the end of 60 minutes on that day, of course. Still, stacking up a national relevant win would certainly go a long way towards Marquette showing that they’re a better team in 2026 than they were in 2025, just to tie this question back to the previous one.
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