Marquette Men's Soccer Preview: vs #1 Creighton

Marquette lost to #10 Georgetown 3-0 on Wednesday as they began a stretch of five straight matches against teams that earned their way into a national ranking at some point this season.  That does not bode well for the postseason hopes of the Golden Eagles.

The good news, if there is good news about this, is that right now, MU is only one point outside the Big East tournament.  The top six teams in the league make it in, and Marquette's four points are right behind the five that St. John's is lugging around.  Slightly worse news: Xavier also has four points, but that only slightly worse because Marquette still has a head-to-head match against the Musketeers coming up.

Let's be honest: with five squads earning a national ranking at some point this season, it's going to be hard to end up with one of six spots in the postseason tournament.  That's just facts.  However, if results like Wednesday's are in Marquette's future, then MU's chances are going to start slipping away quickly.

Saturday gives the Golden Eagles a chance to make national headlines, though, as they host a team with the longest winning streak in the country...

Big East Match #5: vs #1 Creighton (13-0-0, 4-0-0 Big East)

When: Saturday, October 17, 2015, at 7:05pm
Where: Valley Fields
Audio/Visual: The Big East Digital Network on Fox Sports Go has the streaming broadcast, plus there's live stats.
Special Promotions: First 150 students get a Marquette travel mug loaded up with hot chocolate!
Twitter Updates: @MarquetteSoccer

13 consecutive wins to start the season.  It's an insane run.  To give you some context, with this week's 1-0 win over Butler, Creighton has one more win than Marquette did when they went on a crazy run to open the 2012 season and ended up ranked #2 in the country before losing their first match.

The Jays have had five 1-0 wins this season, but they haven't really been that close to losing or even going to a draw in any of them.  The closest that CU has come to a non-win this season was probably their Big East opener at Seton Hall.  The Pirates had a 2-1 lead on Creighton with less than 19 minutes to play, but the Bluejays ended up coming away with a 4-2 win.  I know exactly where I was when Creighton made their comeback: I was at The Micro at Harvest Fair on the Wisconsin State Fair grounds, and MrsB was giving me all of the glares for fistpumping for the Jays avoiding the massive upset to an SHU team that *still* hasn't picked up a win on the season.

Fabian Herbers is the offensive star for Creighton, and you can make the argument that he's the offensive star for the entire damn country.  He's got 27 points this season on 10 goals and seven assists, which means he's had a direct hand in 17 of CU's 29 goals this season.  He's fourth in the country in goals, tied for fourth in the country in assists, and third in the country in points.  He only trails USC Upstate's Gordon Wild (29 points) and Temple's Jorge Gomez Sanchez (28 points).

As if it wasn't enough to try to sell you on watching the unbeaten and untied #1 team in the country with one of the best scorers in the country, well, their goalie's flipping amazing.  I am so convinced that Connor Sparrow deserves the Big East Goalkeeper of the Year award, I'm starting to develop a eye twitch every time someone else wins Goalkeeper of the Week.  Y'know how Herbers has scored 10 goals this season?  Sparrow has ONLY ALLOWED FIVE.  TWO of them were against Seton Hall.  He's allowed THREE goals the entire rest of the season.  At this point, I'm starting to refuse to believe that he's actually only the 6'2" and 175 lbs as listed on the Creighton athletics website.