Are you prepared for Marquette men’s soccer to take their particular brand of hijinks into Big East play?
Well, TOO BAD if you’re not, because they’re starting off league action on Friday night. No, they’re not done with non-conference matches. I don’t know why the Big East schedules like this, but Marquette’s going to visit Milwaukee coming up on Tuesday, then two weeks later host UIC on a Tuesday, and then two weeks after that, Edgewood comes to the Valley. In the meantime, Marquette is going to keep
playing Big East matches on the weekends, either Friday or Saturday. By the time that Edgewood contest rolls around, MU will have just three league matches left to go. Weird!
In any case, Marquette is 3-0-2 on the year, and as I’ve said repeatedly in this previews, they’ve played a grand total of one normal match this season. Last weekend’s 1-0 win over Lipscomb was the first time all season that David Korn’s team got through 90 minutes of action without either A) someone picking up a red card or B) someone serving a suspension from a red card in the previous match. They picked up an early goal against the Bisons and then mauled them in terms of shot differential in the second half, but ultimately had to settle for Mitchell Dryden’s strike being the only goal in the match.
That pushes Dryden out in front of Mateo Stoka for the team lead in goals with three now, and because of assists, Dryden shares the team lead in points with Stoka. It seems that Korn has a mostly settled starting 11 in his mind, as if you ignore the missed matches for the red cards earned by Justin Milovanov and Andreas Fotland and what looks like a day off for Stoka and the kinesio-tape that’s visible on his knee AND the day off for keeper Marten Brink against an overmatched Chicago State team, there’s eight guys that have started “every” match for the Golden Eagles. That’s good news, even if MU hasn’t quite gotten the chance for those guys to gel together as a coherent group because of [gestures broadly].
If the takeaway on the first five matches is “hey, it turned into a struggle sometimes, but we’re still undefeated, believe it or not, keep working,” then that’s a pretty solid way to go about their business. Now it’s time to see if that mindset is good enough for three points on the road in the Big East.
Big East Match #1: at Creighton Bluejays (3-2-2, 0-0-0 Big East)
Date: Friday, September 19, 2025
Time: 7pm Central
Location: Morrison Stadium, Omaha, Nebraska
Streaming: ESPN+
Live Stats: Stat Broadcast
Twitter Updates: @MarquetteSoccer
Marquette is 9-11-2 all time against Creighton. The Bluejays have pulled the series in their direction over the past two years with a 2-1 contest in Omaha in 2023, and then a 5-2 win last year in Milwaukee.
Things have turned in a positive direction for Creighton maybe since the start of September depending on how you want to count scoreless draws. From the first of the month onwards, the Bluejays are 3-0-1 after kicking off September with a scoreless draw at home against Tulsa. They have a 2-0 win over Denver, a 3-2 dramatic home win over Omaha, and they’re coming off a 3-0 victory over Oral Roberts last Saturday night. That’s a lot better than their 0-2-1 start where they managed just two goals, one of which was an equalizer in a draw against FIU and the other was a penalty kick in a 3-1 loss to Michigan where they were already down 2-0 at the time.
Going back to my point about scoreless draws: That’s a 0-2-2 start with just two goals if you push the Tulsa match backwards to “not a great start.”
Miguel Arilla is Creighton’s leading scorer this season, topping the goals column with three and the points column with seven. Matthew Reed is one point behind him on two goals and a team high two assists. Bautista Rossi has a pair of goals and an assist as well to join Arilla and Reed as the only guys on the roster with at least one goal and one assist. Arilla’s the shots leader with 14 and Rossi’s the only other one in double digits at 10.
Matthew Hudson is the goalkeeper here, playing every single minute so far. He’s only stopping 66.7% of shots on frame through seven matches, which seems to be a thing that Marquette might be able to take advantage of at some point. Hudson only allows 1.29 goals per 90 minutes of action, which is partially because Creighton’s outshooting opponents 12.1 to 10.0 on the year. If you can mitigate your keeper’s save percentage issue by merely not allowing shots, that’s a good plan. It’s also possibly hurting Hudson because if CU is suffocating attacks early, then the ones that do get through are probably creating pretty solid opportunities.
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