#1 — Hey, this is gonna turn around, right?
2023, the final year with Louis Bennett in charge of Marquette men’s soccer: 7-6-3 overall, 1-5-2 Big East play. 31 goals for, 20 goals against, with a 11 to 14 mark in Big East action. 14.7 shots per game for, 10.5 shots per game against.
2024, Year One for new head coach David Korn: 6-7-4, 2-4-2 Big East play, and just 5-7-4 when you throw out a 1-0 win over Edgewood. 21 goals for, 21 goals against, with a 9 to 14 mark in Big East action. 11.0 shots per game for, 11.6 against.
2025, Year Two: 7-7-2 overall, 1-7-0 Big East play, and just 6-7-2 when you throw out a 2-0 win over Edgewood. 25 goals for, 21 goals against… but a 5 to 11 mark in eight league matches. 15.4 shots per game for, 9.7 shots per game against.
David Korn’s overall record of 13-14-4 is useless to talk about because Marquette is 10-3-2 in non-conference action — 8-3-2 against Division 1 competition — and a very not good 3-11-2 in Big East competition. If we wanted to watch Marquette putter around the .500 mark for the full season and trail towards the back of the Big East standings, we could have just let Louis Bennett keep going. Instead, former athletic director Bill Scholl struck a deal to get Bennett to walk away, and David Korn has yet to show that he can do something different in terms of results.
In other words:
#2 — But what’s the actual issue?
In Year #1, David Korn’s Golden Eagles were 4-3-1 going into their first Big East contest, and that included a pair of losses to two ranked Big Ten teams. Last year, Marquette was 3-0-2 going into their first Big East match of the season.
Clearly, we can say that Marquette was having success against their non-conference schedule and then things fell apart after that in both seasons. That bears out when you scroll back up for a second and remember that two of Marquette’s three non-conference losses were to ranked opponents, and all three of them came in Year #1. Whatever he’s doing tactically, whether that’s game plan or player deployment or whatever, it works…. to a degree. When Marquette gets into Big East play, things go sideways kind of quickly and MU can’t get anything accomplished. What is it about [gestures broadly] that works against teams lower than Marquette on the pecking order, but not so much when it’s the teams higher up the scale?
Is it an actual tactical problem? Is Korn’s preferred method of playing a non-starter against Big East teams? Is it injuries? Are Korn’s plans falling apart because by the time he gets a month into the season he’s not playing with the same set of guys he was expecting to have on the field? Is he trying to set a system and stick to it no matter what, regardless of the actual abilities of the guys available to him? Is Korn trying to run an operation where he doesn’t have the players that fit it or at least can’t execute it at a level to make it function? How close is he? Is it just a few players away? Are the 15 new guys on the roster this fall the answer to the problems that we’ve seen the past couple of seasons? After all, at some point, this roster is entirely guys that Korn recruited to Marquette, and if we’re getting further away from something that could be measured as a success, that’s not a good sign for long term development of the program.
#3 — How much longer is this kind of thing going to be allowed to continue?
In a different time, Louis Bennett didn’t win seven games in a season until his fifth year in charge of Marquette. It was incremental growth for a long time, literally going from one win to two to three to four in the first four years.
The difference is that Bennett was hired to start coaching the Golden Eagles in the fall of 2006. In the spring of 2006, Marquette men’s basketball finished their first season in the Big East and returned to the NCAA tournament for the first time since Dwyane Wade was pulling on a blue and gold uniform.
So that’s two things at work. 1) Marquette’s primary athletic attraction was running at a rapidly improving level, which catches everyone’s attention and draws it away from anything that might be considered a problem. 2) Louis Bennett came over from Milwaukee after a run where he won at least 11 matches in nine of his 10 seasons and finished with a record of 135-64-17. It was reasonable to say “hey, the guy can coach, let’s let him figure it out while our men’s basketball attendance is going through the roof because of success in a big time league.” Eventually it worked, and Bennett had several very successful years and a bunch of “well, that’s fine, honestly” years.
David Korn went 98-38-26 in Division 2 before taking this job. We’d be lying if we said that there was a reason to doubt his ability to coach winning soccer. He has a history of doing it, same as was the case with Bennett.
But it’s not working after two seasons at Marquette, and on top of that, Marquette’s money situation is all messed up. Between 1) revenue sharing with the basketball team, 2) price hikes on season tickets causing some people to drop their tickets, and 3) the worst men’s basketball season in decades probably causing even more people to drop their tickets, Korn isn’t scuffling along in the same situation that Bennett was scuffling along 20 years ago.
Obviously the administration’s attention should be focused on getting both basketball teams back into the NCAA tournament and keeping the volleyball team operating as The Best Team On Campus. But at some point, multiple things not going well is going to cause questions to be asked about how the administration is managing the entire athletic department…… and, well, it’s probably in David Korn’s best interest to not be in charge of something that’s not going well when that spotlight gets turned on, right?
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