The Marquette Men’s Lacrosse Single Season Goals Chart

By now, you should be more than familiar with our series of regularly updating leaderboards for various Marquette Golden Eagles sports accomplishments. Keep checking back to that link in the previous sentence for our charts as the seasons continue to churn through history and MU’s various teams continue to create new memories and accomplishments.

Here, we take a look at the single season goals record for men’s lacrosse.

Bobby O’Grady did not wrap up 2022 with the single season record for points, but he did knock down the program record for goals in a season. Before 2022, only Ryan McNamara had ever scored 40 goals in a season, and he did that exactly on the nose in 2016, the year MU won their first ever Big East championship. At the time, McNamara had become just the second Marquette player to ever record 35 goals in a season and the first to ever clear 37. O’Grady went flying right past the workhorse of Marquette’s first two NCAA tournament teams, and landed on 45 goals in MU’s 15 games in 2022. That makes him the first Marquette player to ever average a hat trick for an entire season. Up til now, Tyler Melnyk’s 2.57 per game in 2014 was the gold standard for the Blue and Gold.

I want to take another thing into account here while celebrating O’Grady’s accomplishment. Scroll down and look at the top 10 right now. You know what you don’t see? You don’t see anyone listed twice. No one in the admittedly short history of Marquette lacrosse has ever had two 24+ goal seasons. Even Ryan McNamara, who set the record in 2016, followed that up with just 22 markers the following season. So here’s the thing about that, as we go forward: Bobby O’Grady is going to get three more cracks at this top 10 list. Three more cracks at breaking his own record, sure, three more shots at becoming MU’s first ever 50 goal scorer. That’s the obvious way to look at it.

The other way to look at it? There’s a non-zero chance that this top 10 list turns into a Bobby O’Grady tribute page by the time his collegiate career is over. It seems extremely likely that O’Grady will bump at least one of these guys out of the top 10 eventually as all he has to do to get there is go just a bit past half as many goals as he had this season. He had three goals a game this year, and if he drops to just two a game while playing 15 games next year, that’s still a three-way tie for the fifth most goals in a season. Heck, forget the top 10 list, the top 5 spots could be just Bobby O’Grady and Ryan McNamara by the time things are said and done.

Here’s what the chart looks like at the end of the 2022 season.