One philosophy I like is that winning is fun and Notre Dame should do more of it. For example: On Wednesday night, Notre Dame played late into the evening in an empty gym in Massachusetts against one of the worst power conference teams in the country. The Irish should have had no trouble winning. They had a lot of trouble winning. Even when they’d finally put the game away, they had trouble closing the door. Julian Roper’s knee landed on a Boston College player’s testicles during a loose ball scrum, and under college basketball officiating, that means the other team gets free points.
Thank goodness Notre Dame won that game. Thank goodness we’re not here talking about whether Notre Dame will make the ACC Tournament. Only one regular season game remains which would be an absolute indignity to lose. The other six? Fair play. I might regret saying that—it’s possible to make any game embarrassing, even as an underdog—but it’s the case. Notre Dame plays seven more regular season games. Five of them are at home. Only one of those comes against a team who shouldn’t at least make the NIT.
That this passes for the hardest remaining ACC schedule is devastating for the ACC. Clemson and Louisville are good, but not great. SMU, Pitt, and Wake Forest are bubble teams. Stanford’s on a train to a first-round NIT home game. Cal is the worst job in power conference basketball, and Mark Madsen’s team is driving that home.
Still, it’s tough. Notre Dame will be an underdog in at least three of the games, and possibly in five or six. They’re an underdog tonight against Louisville. And that, at long last, brings us to a little comparison:
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Louisville is different from Notre Dame. It’s a basketball school at heart. It’s demonstrated a national championship ceiling. It’s a little more in core college basketball country than even South Bend. Still, it’s a place with somewhat limited resources. It was a mid-major until very recently, in the grand scope of history. Louisville should be better than Notre Dame. But not always. Not every year. In college basketball’s atmosphere, the Irish should only hang one stratum below the Cards.
So: How did Pat Kelsey do it? How did he take a cupboard that was not only barren but covered in mold and turn it into the ACC’s third-best team? It’s pretty simple:
He brought in experienced, talented players and instilled a positive culture that fits with his roster.
Kelsey hasn’t been the guy he was at Charleston, where it always felt like he was running around the gym leading layup lines himself. He’s still enthusiastic, but it’s polished in Kentucky. It fits the place better than his old persona would have fit it. He adapted to his environment.
This isn’t an exact model for Notre Dame. I wouldn’t call it an exact model for Louisville. You don’t want a roster full of only seniors. It made sense this season—the program needed to get its feet back under it, and it needed to rely on the transfer portal—but eventually, you’re going to need players to play in your program for multiple seasons. Louisville is most likely to exit the NCAA Tournament in the second round. That’s good for a team who won a combined twelve games the last two years, but it isn’t good for Louisville.
Partly due to necessity (Notre Dame wasn’t going to pay for that many transfers two offseasons back), Micah Shrewsberry’s taken a different tact up in Michiana. By nature, the rebuild’s been slower. But the ultimate goal is a team who looks and plays a lot like Louisville: Talented. Experienced. Positive. Notre Dame’s roster is currently none of those three things. Shrewsberry himself is all three, but it isn’t translating to the court yet.
How do we get there? The talent is on its way. Barring a shock to the system, Notre Dame’s roster should be reasonably talented in two years. The experience should already be there, but what we really want from that is composure, and there’s been none of that. Could the composure arrive next year? Maybe. It’s believable that it could, but it’s hard to trust it when most of the core figures to stay the same.
As for the culture…it’s probably easier when the winning comes first. Winning can sometimes breed culture when culture isn’t already there. The problem is that winning-created culture isn’t as durable as culture which precedes results. That’s what Marcus Freeman’s program had and has. That’s what we need to see from Shrewsberry. It’s going to be hard to tell if it’s present, and we might have it and lose it, and we might never really know for sure whether it’s there. But culture is the goal, and its current absence is the most concerning thing about where this program is at. If this Notre Dame team was this bad and even this uncomposed, but they weren’t mopey? We’d feel better about the direction we were headed. Instead, there’s visible sadness and frustration on the court when things go bad.
Hopefully Wednesday night can provide a spark. That was a tougher win than the Georgia Tech or Syracuse wins. It was maybe the toughest win Notre Dame’s had under Shrewsberry so far. Hopefully it’s a good sign. Hopefully it’s the first piece of a new foundation.
As for the game itself…
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I don’t know if Matt Allocco’s going to be back or not. I don’t know if Shrewsberry will return Kebba Njie to the starting lineup or stick with Nikita Konstantynovskyi. On the first point, it’d be nice to have a great shooter available, but the fact it’s a wrist injury raises questions about Allocco’s effectiveness, and…well, we’ve talked enough about Allocco’s performance and role back when he was healthy. On the second point, neither is a good option. Njie has the higher potential, and he has gotten better, so maybe he’s just a slow developer. But man, does he still have a long way to go to be an effective big.
Louisville doesn’t have many glaring vulnerabilities. They like to shoot threes and they’re not always great at it, but it’s hard to make that pay since they fight pretty effectively for long rebounds (this is another reason it might not be terrible to see Allocco sit). They’ve had some injuries, but the relevant ones all seem to be of the nagging sort, so we shouldn’t count on them to be shorthanded. Still, they’re not so good as to make this outcome a foregone conclusion. Notre Dame’s absolute best performance—the kind of game we played against Georgetown in November—should be enough to beat a team like Louisville on Louisville’s average night.
Hopefully it happens. It won’t exactly be playing “spoiler”—that’s a term better-suited for games against bubble hopefuls—but it’d be a landmark victory for the program. I don’t like that we’re at that point either, but as was the case on Wednesday, the fact of the matter is that we’re here. Since we’re going to be here either way, it’d at least be more fun if we won.
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