Marquette Men’s Lacrosse Suffers Another 2nd Half Outage Against #17 Ohio State

Marquette men’s lacrosse scored just one second half goal as they got ran off the field after the break in a 12-6 loss to #17 Ohio State on Friday night. MU drops to 1-2 on the season, while the Buckeyes advance to 5-0.

Andy DeMichiei’s marker with 2:11 remaining in the fourth quarter is the only goal that Marquette has scored in the second half in their past two games. The Golden Eagles were shutout across the final 30 minutes against Richmond last week Saturday, and here, the Buckeyes held Marquette without a goal for over 30 minutes before DeMichiei’s late goal. This is very bad. The offense was supposed to be the side of the field that we didn’t have to worry about with Marquette. Ryan McNamara carrying the load, Tanner Thomson continuing his emergence from last year (he had a hat trick here!), Kyran Clarke and Andy DeMichiei stepping forward into bigger roles, guys like Joe Dunn, John Wagner, Grant Preisler chipping in. Should be okay.

Instead the Golden Eagles managed just 11 shots after halftime and didn’t even put any of their five third quarter shots on goal. Sure, not having face-off specialist Zachary Melillo here after his injury last week didn’t help as Marquette lost 16 of the 22 face-offs in the game, but Marquette opened up with a 2-0 lead and led 5-3 late in the first half. Not winning faceoffs (Ohio State had won 7 of 11 up thru that 5-3 lead) wasn’t exactly limiting the Golden Eagles’ offense early on. It’s hard to say that Marquette going oh-fer on face-offs in the third quarter had any impact on the game after that.

The primary question is this: Did Marquette start doing something differently after the first 27 minutes that caused the offense to short circuit or did Ohio State alter their defense in order to pull the plug on MU’s offense? If it’s A: Joe Amplo has to figure out how to get them to knock that off. If it’s B: Amplo and his staff have to figure how out to counter that change because opponents are just going to keep exploiting that over and over.

Here’s a good news/bad news stat if there ever has been one: Goalie Cole Blazer set a program record with 18 saves in the game. Hey, if this was the 25-17 Stony Brook-Brown game from the other day, well, then hooray for Blazer for knocking down all those shots. Unfortunately, he needed to make 18 saves to make the game even remotely presentable as Ohio State just kept shooting.

Here’s a highlight reel of all of Marquette’s goals in the game courtesy of Marquette Wire and GoMarquette.com:

Up Next: For better or for worse, it’s a quick turnaround for Marquette. Friday night’s Ohio State game was their first game in the Midwest Lacrosse Classic, so Sunday afternoon will bring their second game. They’ll be hosting Detroit, who is coming off of a 13-10 win over Bellarmine on Friday afternoon. Faceoff is set for 3pm in the Andy Glockner Memorial Bubble at Valley Fields, and we’re going to get a very interesting litmus test for the Golden Eagles.