Marquette has to play the rest of the season like they’re pissed off about getting their win over Butler stolen away from them.
They almost made it out of Indianapolis with a win. Mia Hurd made four saves, three in the first half while the match was still scoreless. They had, up until Butler’s equalizer with 10 seconds left, outshot the Bulldogs 15-10. Butler came into the match without a win against a top 180 RPI opponent this season, and one of their two losses was to a sub-250 Wright State squad.
It looked like Marquette was going to wrap up a road win over a team that, at least according to what the RPI makes things look like, a team that they should/need to beat if the Golden Eagles want to get a top four finish and get to the Big East tournament.
But there’s Gemma Gillespie’s head with 10 seconds left, taking a ball that was otherwise going wide and redirecting it into the net where Hurd had no chance to do anything about it. It should have been three points coming back to Milwaukee, it almost was, but instead it’s just one. A road point in league play is useful, it’s a quality result, but MU should have had the other two and they don’t.
So now they have to go find them somewhere else in the next nine matches. Fighting that extra effort to flip a road draw to a road win. Defending the Valley in a tough situation to earn three instead of a draw. Something over the next five weeks has to be done to reclaim what has been ripped from them, and that’s going to require using this result from Saturday to fuel a fire.
Specifically, it probably has to be fire on the offensive end. Marquette’s defense is more often than not going to be enough to get them through 90 minutes. We’ve seen that in tougher situations for Marquette this season. The offense has, to a certain degree, been disappointing, or at the very least not holding up their end. Change that. push that extra effort, drive harder at the net and make defenders adjust to your pressure. Find an extra seam for one more quality pass for an even better shot. So on and so forth.
The Golden Eagles have to do this. Why do I say “have to” here? Because the alternative is letting this draw deflate them and turn a disappointing draw into a disaster of a loss somewhere down the line.
Big East Match #2: at Georgetown Hoyas (3-3-2, 0-1-0 Big East)
Date: Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Time: 6pm Central
Location: Shaw Field, Washington, D.C.
Streaming: ESPN+
Live Stats: Sidearm Stats
Bluesky Updates: @AnonymousEagle
Marquette is 3-13-1 all time against Georgetown. All three of Marquette’s wins came in the first four meetings, including the 2012 Big East championship, and MU’s last win against Georgetown — back in 2013! — is somehow the last time the Golden Eagles beat a ranked opponent. The draw came two years after that, and it’s been 11 straight losses since. Marquette has scored just one goal in those 11 losses, and none at all in the last six.
Well, that’s a weird one. Officially, Marquette comes into this game ahead of Georgetown in the Big East standings. The Golden Eagles took a draw in their league opener on Saturday, while the Hoyas took a loss. Small sample size and so on, obviously, but Marquette is in a six-way tie for third with one point and Georgetown is in a two-way tie for 10th with zero points. Okay, three-way for ninth if you want, sure, because UConn hasn’t played a match yet, but that also means they don’t have a loss yet, and the Hoyas do.
Now, we should point out that the scheduling gods did Georgetown no favors by facing off the two best teams in the Big East so far this season against each other in the first contest of league play. The Hoyas had an interesting enough non-conference slate to have them ready to go, but the fact of the matter is that Georgetown still hasn’t beaten a top 100 opponent yet this season even if they do have two scoreless draws against top 80 opponents. Perhaps 4-3 Xavier was an unsurprising result for their opener given all of that, plus it was Reiley Fitzpatrick’s first night back in net after leaving a match at the half back on September 10th after an on-field collision that sent her to the hospital to get checked out. She only made three saves on XU’s 10 total shots in the loss, so there’s a question as to whether she really was 100%, I think.
Georgetown does a great job taking advantage of the chances they create, scoring 13 goals in just eight matches this season while only averaging 11.5 shots a night. That’s a real problem for their opponents in general, because they’ve only allowed 10 goals and the Hoyas are only giving up 7.6 shot attempts on average. Before you say “oh, they give up more than a goal per game,” please remember that they went into Saturday night with just six goals allowed in seven matches.
Abigail Droner remains the top threat on the Hoyas’ offensive end. She has five goals after tallying what was an equalizer at the time in the first half against Xavier. She also has a team high three assists on the year and is the only GU player with more than six points right now. Droner is also the only Hoya with more than 15 shot attempts, and her 21 account for nearly 23% of all of Georgetown’s attempts.
I presume we’ll still see Reiley Fitzpatrick in net for this one. You could chalk her bad night up to merely “playing Xavier,” but in terms of save percentage, neither GU keeper is a great option. Fitzpatrick is only stopping 63% of shots on frame while allowing 1.31 goals per 90 minutes. Meanwhile, Alexa Hadley has only stopped 50% of the shots she’s seen in her 103 minutes of action this season. If there’s a question about Fitzpatrick’s health, I think the right move is to let GU’s field defense handle Marquette’s lackluster offensive finishing abilities and ride this one out with Hadley with another match coming up right away on Saturday.
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