And now, the Golden Eagles turn their attention from the top 10 ranked team in the league to arguably the worst team in the league.
Marquette volleyball can not, under any circumstances, lose their next match.
I don’t mean it’s must win. I mean that you can not follow a relatively competitive loss to #6 Creighton with a loss to a team that hasn’t won a match in a month. Once the NCAA gets around to releasing the official RPI for the season, we’ll probably find out that the Golden Eagles are right on track to make the national championship tournament this year. But that’s going to depend on not taking debilitating losses, and dropping one to a Butler team that’s currently #248 in the Evollve rankings…. yeah, that would be debilitating.
I don’t have anything else to say, to be honest. Get through this home match, focus up on visiting St. John’s (Evollve #119, third best in the league) and Villanova next weekend, and keep on chugging until the rematch with Creighton in a month.
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Big East Match #4: vs Butler Bulldogs (2-12, 0-2 Big East)
Date: Sunday, October 6, 2024
Time: 1pm Central
Location: Al McGuire Center, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Streaming: FloSports
Live Stats: Sidearm Stats
Twitter Updates: @MarquetteVB
Marquette is 20-9 all time against Butler. The Golden Eagles come into Sunday afternoon riding a five match winning streak against the Bulldogs, including a sweep in their only meting last year, and they haven’t dropped a home match against them since 2017. That 2017 contest was also the last time that MU lost to Butler in a normal season, as BU’s most recent victory came in the 2020 timeshifted pandemic season.
Yeah, so. Butler’s not good. In their 12 losses this season, they have been swept seven times. That includes each of the last four matches and five of the last six. It definitely includes their last match, which was at home against Creighton on Friday. Fresh off a four set match with Marquette, the Bluejays cratered the Bulldogs, allowing 19 points in the first set and then only 15 and then only 11 in the third. BU’s only wins of the year came in a home-and-home set with Indiana State on back-to-back days in early September…. and yes, that means they’re riding a nine match losing streak.
The Bulldogs are hitting just .156 on the year. They average giving up two aces per set, and since Marquette scores 1.5 on average against the 8th toughest schedule in the country according to Evollve, that seems like great news for the Golden Eagles. What else? They have just as many blocking errors this season as they do solo blocks. That’s probably bad, right?
Abby Maesch is their offensive leader at 3.17 kills and 3.55 points per set, but it seems that she’s easy enough to disrupt. The 5’11” senior is hitting just 1.24 this year while racking up nearly 130 more swings than anyone else on the roster. It’s not like turning attacks over to #2 on the swing list is a great plan, as Elise Ward is hitting .167. Remember, this is entirely like baseball, where anything over .300 means you’re doing great…… and under .200 is, uh, not good. Maesch has missed some time lately, including all of the DePaul match, but she did have 28 swings against Creighton on Friday. Ward didn’t play at all against the Bluejays, so we’ll have to wait and see what happens with BU’s attack.