At a glance, you’d think that 1.44 goals per game on 14+ shots per game is a pretty solid offensive performance from Marquette men’s soccer this season.
But that’s the whole season.
Over Marquette’s last
five matches, they have scored four goals on 14.6 shots per match. That’s just 0.80 goals per game, darn near half the rate of the season as a whole.
Here’s the bad news: Three of those goals came against Milwaukee as the Golden Eagles retained the Milwaukee Cup.
Here’s the worse news: The Panthers are 2-4-6 on the year and the loss to Marquette kicked off a run of four straight contests without a victory.
So that’s not a jump up and down accomplishment, and that makes it one goal in the other four matches, and absolutely none at all on 35 shots against three Big East opponents. Quite specifically: Marquette hasn’t scored at all since Tristen Ronnestad-Stevens’ match winner in the 83rd minute against UWM. They head into Tuesday night’s home game riding a streak of over 187 consecutive minutes without a goal.
That’s a problem, and as we’ll get into in a second, Tuesday night’s opponent isn’t exactly going to be making it easy for Marquette to maintain a persistent offensive pressure. I don’t know what the wake up call can possibly be for the Golden Eagles here, but whatever they’ve been doing, it hasn’t been working as of late. Something needs to change, or the 2025 season is going to turn very ugly very quickly.
Match #10: vs Illinois-Chicago Flames (7-0-3, 0-0-2 Missouri Valley)
Date: Tuesday, October 7, 2025
Time: 7pm Central
Location: Valley Fields, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Streaming: ESPN+
Live Stats: Stat Broadcast
Twitter Updates: @MarquetteSoccer
Bluesky Updates: @AnonymousEagle
Marquette is 6-5-2 all time against Illinois-Chicago. This series goes alllll the way back to 1964, but only four meetings happened before the turn of the century. Last year’s UIC 2-0 victory in Chicago was their first win in the series since 2011, but that’s also because the two teams hadn’t played since 2017.
UIC comes in riding a 10 match undefeated streak on account of the fact that they haven’t lost a match yet this season. I don’t think we can quite say it’s been a big turnaround since last season because they haven’t eclipsed last year’s win total yet, but they went 7-10-0 last year and have just six regular season matches remaining including this one. Math says they can’t have 10 losses, so that’s good news for them.
Less great is the fact that two of their three draws are their last two matches. They finished up at 1-1 on the road against Bradley and ended up scoreless at home against Drake back on Friday. Those were their first two Missouri Valley matches of the season, so that’s an auspicious start after going 7-0-1 up to that point of the year. It’s worth noting that Marquette also went to a draw with both of those teams, although they were lucky to get there both times, first after playing with just 10 men for the majority of the match against Bradley and then by pulling a final five minutes goal out of thin air against Drake.
It’s probably not soothing on any level after what I wrote up top to indicate that UIC is about on Marquette’s level at least in terms of in-common opponents.
One of the reasons that possibly explains why the Flames haven’t lost let this year? They hold a decisive edge in shot attempts over their opponents on average. UIC attempts nearly 22 shots per game, putting just about 42% of those on goal. On the other end of the field? 9.9 attempts allowed on average, and only a third of those shots have been on frame. That’s a volume and accuracy advantage that goes pretty high up on the scouting report, as it’s something you have to find a way to counteract.
Edouard Nys is the big name on that scouting report. He leads UIC in points with 23 so far, getting there on a team high nine goals along with five assists. Darrell Turcios is next in goals with four, but he’s part of the rest of the roster that hasn’t broken past 10 points relative to the fireworks show that Nys provides. Nys is the team leader in shots this season, averaging more than five per game, but the Golden Eagles can’t ignore Rui Reis. He only has two goals and three assists on the season, but he’s second in shots at 42, just 12 behind Nys.
Owen Cornell has been the beneficiary of all of that shooting happening at the other end of the field this season. In the eight matches he’s played — Kevin Dabrowski has two starts against Air Force and Chicago State — Cornell is letting in a goal per 90 minutes of action and he’s only stopping 71.4% of shots on goal. That’s not ideal stuff, nor is it perhaps the world breaking type of numbers you might expect to see from a team that is undefeated through 10 matches. Under normal circumstances, I would say that if MU can stem the tide of the Flames attack and flip the field in the other direction, they should be able to find ways to beat Cornell. However, nothing about the three Big East matches so far this season is building up my confidence in Marquette’s abilities on the offensive end.
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