If you’re catching up today, coming off of football season:
Notre Dame goes to Charlottesville this evening 2–5 in ACC play and 8–10 overall. Playing in what’s by far the worst power conference, top to bottom, the Fighting Irish have won just once in their last six tries. Last weekend, they blew an early 17-point lead at Syracuse, failing to respond when the Orange started grappling. Micah Shrewsberry did make his displeasure known at the end, but for as bed as the refereeing may have been, Notre Dame’s performance was worse. This team is skinny, and so far, they haven’t been tough enough physically or mentally to get away with it.
Nevertheless, hope abounds.
It was last December against Virginia that Notre Dame, eleven days removed from a twenty-point home debacle against The Citadel, blew out Tony Bennett’s final team to breathe some life into a frustrating rebuilding season. It was last February against Virginia Tech that Notre Dame, coming off an understandable but miserable seven-game losing streak, beat the Hokies to spark a 6–4 end-of-season run. We all remember plenty of Mike Brey teams who went belly-up only to get their feet back under them, at the very least giving us reason to turn on the TV on Selection Sunday.
It’s college basketball.
Teams get better and worse in a hurry.
A convenient thing for Notre Dame today is that the Fighting Irish are the better team. Even given the recent performance, Notre Dame enters John Paul Jones Arena a one-point favorite on kenpom and a two-point favorite in betting markets. A few things to watch for:
Is There Crowd Noise?
Virginia’s as depressed as we are. Maybe more depressed, since they were recent national champions, their iconic coach abandoned them in October, and they don’t even have a good football team or women’s basketball team to soothe their sorrows. Virginia’s waiting for…baseball season? I don’t know if they’re good at baseball these days or not.
Still, we’ve never won in Charlottesville. We’re 0–9 there all-time and 0–8 since we joined the ACC. If memory serves, Virginia was the last team Mike Brey hadn’t beaten. In hindsight, that drought wasn’t all that long—we beat them in the 2017 ACC Tournament—but norms were different back then around Notre Dame basketball. It felt like a long time.
Overall, we’re only 3–13 against Virginia since they became a conference opponent. They’ve had our number. I don’t think Charlottesville’s a particularly tough place to play these days (kenpom works off teams’ last 60 conference games, and it has Virginia seventh-toughest in the ACC), but that might be wishful thinking.
Can Markus Burton Save Us From a Close Game?
The thing about Notre Dame this year has been failure in close games, and the thing about Saturday is that Burton nearly let us avoid getting to a close game in the first place. Virginia’s still a strong defensive team, even immediately post-Bennett, but they’re not particularly physical. They’re more disciplined than Syracuse was. Most of the time, this is to their benefit, but it might also be to ours.
We’d rather simply be able to win games even if they’re close. But if Burton gets going, we might be able to dodge the close game altogether. Comfortable wins are better than close wins, especially when they’re the only kind you know you can get.
Will We See More J.R. Konieczny?
EvanMiya isn’t everything, and Micah Shrewsberry knows basketball better than I do, and Micah Shrewsberry specifically earned himself a lot of trust with personnel decisions last season, when his own son was among the worst players in Division I for two months then blossomed in ACC play.
Still, I’m curious why we don’t see J.R. Konieczny get more run. I’m sure I’m biased towards him—he’s a South Bend kid who stuck around when Mike Brey left, and his performance against Oklahoma State last year was massive at the time—but he does grade out as the most effective defensive player on this team based on Miyakawa’s Bayesian Performance Rating. He’s not an offensive liability either.
This is the time in the college basketball rollercoaster where we often see coaches make lineup changes. They look for a spark. They flip some scripts. When things get stale, they shake up the jar. Is that something Shrewsberry does today, with Konieczny or another role player? We wouldn’t mind.
There’s One Thing Virginia Does Well on Offense
Virginia’s also won just two ACC games, and they’re also 1–5 in their last six. They did, though, shoot 55% on threes this week against Boston College, and that wasn’t entirely out of character. This is a good shooting team, and it’s possible they’re figuring that out. They’re terrible at getting to the line. They’re terrible at getting second chances. They struggle to score inside and they’re sloppy with the ball. But when they move the ball effectively, they get themselves open looks, and when they get themselves open looks, they often hit them.
That’s the thing to watch for on our defensive end.
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Game’s at 6:30 PM South Bend Time on ESPN2. Go Irish.
