If there’s one benefit of the ACC’s current state, it’s that it keeps giving Notre Dame games that Notre Dame should win. The Irish are favored to win tonight in Chestnut Hill, just as they’ve been favored to win six of their last seven times out there. Over that stretch, they’re 3–4, but they sure do keep us hoping.
There’s an echo of 2006 this year, in that in 2006 Notre Dame also lost a lot of close games. That year, our guys dropped nine of their sixteen Big East matchups by one or two possessions. Seven ended within three points. Four went to overtime. All ten conference losses came by single digits. It was torture, a heartbreaking end to what should have been a legendary Chris Quinn career.
What went wrong in all those games in 2006? It was coaching, mainly. This was the era where Mike Brey would reportedly look around the timeout huddle during end-of-game sequences and ask, “What do you guys think?” It was looseness to a fault, the worst Brey could be in the pre-NIL era. Eventually, it worked out. Brey got better, and luck changed, and over the next seventeen years, Notre Dame wasn’t notably good nor notably bad in competitive final moments.
That echo is only an echo. The 2006 team was pretty good. This team is bad. The 2006 team couldn’t beat anybody better than them, but they pounded bad teams and hung with everybody. Quinn was a star. Torin Francis was reliable. Colin Falls was established, Kyle McAlarney was in the building, and Russell Carter was a year from The Russell Carter Year. Rob Kurz was involved. Rick Cornett was the resident Senior Who’d Paid His Dues. Of the eight-man rotation, Luke Zeller is the only one I remember negatively. Even there, it wasn’t really Luke Zeller’s fault. Especially not in 2006, his freshman year. The guy was never physical enough to make the talent play. At eighteen years old, that problem still seemed solvable.
Zeller’s an interesting name to remember these days. We remember Zeller with frustration not because he was bad, or because he was a bad guy, but because he was frustrating. How much we like or dislike a player has little to do with how good or bad that player is. It has more to do with how hard that player plays and how smart they play and—maybe most important—how their performance compares to our expectations. That goes for teams, too. Last year’s team was worse than this year’s team. This year’s team is more frustrating.
The frustration this year is greater than the sum of its parts. Besides Matt Allocco, nobody is performing very differently from their preseason expectations. Even Allocco’s at least still shooting the ball well, or he was when he was healthy. Relative to expectations at the time they signed, only Allocco, Kebba Njie, and Braeden Shrewsberry can really be labeled disappointments, with Shrewsberry’s legacy still malleable and much improved over the last fourteen months, with at least a little polish to accompany the constant hoisting.
When that’s the case—when frustration with individual players is mild but frustration with the team is high—it’s natural to turn to the coach. After Saturday’s loss—the second outright abomination in three games—Micah Shrewsberry acknowledged this. “I deserve every bit of criticism that is coming this way.” “I’m the one calling the plays down the stretch.” “It’s my group. We’re undisciplined.” “That’s a focus thing. That’s a toughness thing…More stuff that’s the coach’s fault.”
It was a good press conference, a little reminiscent of Marcus Freeman’s after the Ten Men on the Field loss in 2023. Shrewsberry correctly identified the issues and took responsibility for them. You can ask for more than that. You can ask for the team who was supposed to land in the NIT, based on preseason kenpom ratings, to at least play at an NIT level. But when you’re getting underperformance, it helps to hear clarity about it.
When Notre Dame hired Micah Shrewsberry, the cover letter looked like this:
- From Indiana. Loves South Bend.
- Great offensive mind. Worked with Brad Stevens and Matt Painter. Close with Stevens.
- Successful at Penn State, where the ratio between football and basketball resources was even greater and the talent pipeline was even worse.
- Easy to like.
Now, it looks like this:
- From Indiana. Loves South Bend.
- Some great offensive work in his past. Worked with Brad Stevens and Matt Painter. Close with Stevens.
- Successful at Penn State, where the ratio between football and basketball resources was even greater and the talent pipeline was even worse.
- Inherited an empty roster and few resources at Notre Dame. Beyond Markus Burton’s individual success, not a lot to show so far. One overmatched team. One poorly coached team. A lot of talent arriving in Year 3 and developing for Year 4, though, so consider this bullet subject to change.
- Easy to like.
There’s still a chance Indiana makes a run at Shrewsberry, with no slam-dunk candidate for that job. I know this sounds good to some Notre Dame fans. I don’t think it should. For one thing, part of the reason there’s no slam-dunk candidate for the Indiana job is that there aren’t slam-dunk candidates anywhere right now. We’ve written about this before regarding Texas’s situation. It’s a weak coaching market. With UNC also potentially searching, now is not the time to go hiring. If I was forced to make a list of candidates, I’d include Richard Pitino (the son) near the top. I don’t like that list.
The thing to hope for, then, is that Shrewsberry can solve the problems, in addition to identify them. He seemed to do this last year after the loss to The Citadel and the clunky win over Marist. The culture on that team improved. It’s later this year, and the issue is more significant, but there’s reason enough to hope. There are also at least nine games left, provided Notre Dame makes the ACC Tournament. That’s a big sample. I’m hesitant to use NC State as an example, because look at NC State right now, but their postseason run last spring ended up comprising nearly 25% of their entire season. They weren’t one of the four best teams in the sport. They weren’t one of the forty best teams in the sport. But after 41 games, they were among the top fifty, when after 31 games they weren’t on track to make the NIT.
Let’s reset, then, where we are and where we want these guys to go:
- Notre Dame is 10–13 overall. Kenpom projects a final regular season record of 14–17.
- Notre Dame is 4–8 in the ACC, alone in 15th place. 15 teams make the ACC Tournament. Kenpom projects a final conference record of 8–12, tied for 10th and two games clear of NC State for the last conference tournament spot.
- Heading into games on Monday, Joe Stunardi (our guy, not ESPN’s guy) had Notre Dame roughly six or seven seed lines below the NIT threshold.
- To make the ACC Tournament, then, Notre Dame probably needs to finish at least 3–5, for a 13–18 overall record.
- To finish .500 overall, Notre Dame either needs to go 6–3 or 7–4 from here, with the latter involving a stronger ACC Tournament appearance. The easiest path to this would involve—in addition to beating Boston College (A), Cal (H), and Stanford (H)—beating Pitt (H), SMU (H), and then someone like Syracuse on the ACC Tournament’s opening day, having still landed on the 10-seed, 11-seed, or 12-seed.
- To contend for an NIT berth, a conservative estimate would involve Notre Dame winning a few more games than that. This might mean beating Louisville at home and Wake Forest on the road, then pulling off one upset of a team like Louisville or Clemson in the ACC Tournament. This is really unlikely, unless the NIT cut line ends up falling (which it could). It’s not unlikely enough to be impossible, but Notre Dame is probably not going to the 2025 NIT, even if things go well from here.
- To make the NCAA Tournament, Notre Dame needs to win the ACC Tournament. Even winning out from here probably wouldn’t be enough to make a tournament-worthy résumé in the regular season alone.
Where we’re left, then, is spending the next five weeks hoping for improvement. We’re hoping for Notre Dame to draw a line in the sand and turn some things around. That’s scary to write heading into tonight, a game at Boston College we could very well lose. But that’s the situation. We’re playing for the ACC Tournament, and we’d love to see these guys make some noise once they get there. It starts with beating BC.
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