It was a great final homestand, and hopefully this will become a great week. Was the play high-level? Not really. Were we filled with hope for next year? Not necessarily. But Matt Allocco toughed it out through a ton of hurt, Markus Burton finished his ACC–leading scoring campaign, and Julian Roper and J.R. Konieczny got a whole bunch of minutes in their last ever Purcell Pavilion action. Saturday felt a little like the football team beating Utah in 2010: A satisfying victory closing the South Bend book on a hard few years.
We’re the guys with an NIT probability model, so it’s our duty to tell you that even Notre Dame’s NIT probability is low. It could take as many as four wins this week to get serious consideration from that committee. It was a bad season. It was a bad Year 2 for the Micah Shrewsberry era. We’ll have more to say about the season when the offseason is here, and we’ll have more to say about the offseason as well, but the Irish probably aren’t heading to Charlotte with very much basketball left ahead of them.
And yet…
Look. It’s college basketball. This is the point of this whole sport. So, let’s talk through the path:
- Today: Beat Pitt. We’ve beaten Pitt before. Pitt is beatable. They haven’t beaten a respectable team since January, and while we might not be respectable ourselves, they’ve lost to plenty of teams like us over that stretch.
- Tomorrow: Beat UNC. We had them when they came to South Bend back around New Year’s. Finish the job this time.
- Thursday: Beat Wake Forest. We had them when we went to Winston-Salem last weekend. Finish the job this time.
- Friday: Beat Duke, Georgia Tech, or Virginia. We’ve beaten two of those teams already, so let’s just call it a two-in-three shot we draw one of them again. Or! Maybe Jon Scheyer wants to rest his guys.
- Saturday: Louisville? Clemson? SMU? We were not competitive against any of those teams. Let’s keep going. Stanford? There we go. We just beat Stanford last week.
And that, friends, is how Notre Dame can win its second ACC Tournament.
I do wish we’d won the Big East once.
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We’ll try to do a wrap-up post once the season’s over, and then we’ll hopefully get back on a consistent schedule over the offseason. If Notre Dame’s performance was troubling in Year 2, ours was worse. I think we said this a little while back, but Good Things Shrewing will only be for men’s basketball for the foreseeable future. We’ve got something else on its way for the other sports.
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What do you make of Notre Dame playing better after Braden Shrewsberry got hurt?
I don’t know exactly what to think. I don’t think he’s a bad player, especially on the offensive end, but the team didn’t function well with him taking such a large role. I’d hope that he’s more of a role player next year, and that other guys beyond Burton step up.