Which is pretty great, because the top 5 teams advance to the championship round…..
It was a pretty darn good day for Marquette men’s golf on Monday.
Monday was the first day of competition in the NCAA Regional round at Atkins Golf Club in Urbana, Illinois, and YOUR Marquette Golden Eagles played better than their seeding coming in. MU was the #8 seed in the regional, and after 18 holes, the Golden Eagles are sitting at one-over-par as a team. That has them tied for fifth place with Long Beach State, two strokes back of fourth place Troy, and one stroke ahead of seventh place Oklahoma State.
This is particularly notable, because the top five teams in the regional advance to the NCAA Championships. Marquette has never advanced out of the regional round, and their first 18 holes have put them in solid position to do just that.
Marquette was led by a -3 round from Patrick Adler, who birdied four straight holes on the back nine to end up with a 68 for his first round. He tied Brandon Cloete’s second round in 2015 for the lowest NCAA regional score in program history. That was good enough to land Adler in a tie for third on the individual scoreboard after one round. The best performer not on the five teams that advance gets to advance to the championships as well, so Adler has positioned himself well here. Marquette might be a little further up the leaderboard, but everyone who’s not Patrick Adler had a rough time on the final three holes of the course. Max Lyons and Johan Widal both had two bogeys, while Vinny Cervantes and Mason Schmidtke each bogeyed one of the final three holes.
We’ll have to see how everything shakes out after Tuesday’s second round, but it’s worth noting that the #47 ranked Golden Eagles outplayed three teams ranked better than them, including #2 Oklahoma State and #10 North Carolina, and they played just as well as #26 Long Beach State. Is that one nice day for Marquette and one bad day for those teams, or is there something about Atkins Golf Club that works particularly well for the type of golfers that Marquette is putting on the course?
Marquette will get started on the back nine on Tuesday, with Mason Schmidtke teeing off in a group going off at 8:33am Central time. Marquette’s guys will be paired up with the golfers from Troy and Long Beach State, so they’ll be well aware of how the teams directly next to them in the standings right now are playing. You can keep track of all the goings-on by way of the live scoreboard, available here.