I learned today that Notre Dame has the fifth-most NCAA Tournament wins of any men’s basketball program to have never won the NCAA Tournament. With 40 wins all-time, we’re tied with Kansas State for the “honor,” trailing Gonzaga (44), Purdue (44), Oklahoma (42), and Illinois (42). To be honest, I’m surprised we’ve won that many games.
Notre Dame is unique in its number of NCAA Tournament appearances and corresponding lack of success. Of the fifteen programs with at least 35 appearances, only Notre Dame and Texas have a losing tournament record all-time. You could make an argument—and we’d probably hear about this a lot were Notre Dame basketball good enough to be a consistent national topic—that Notre Dame has historically been overrated by NCAA committees, given more than its fair share of opportunities. We won’t argue that on either side. Instead, we’re curious how a program can be consistently good enough to make the tournament and consistently not good enough to win it.
Of the six programs with 40 or more wins and no NCAA Tournament championships, Notre Dame has made the fewest Final Fours, with just 1978 to our credit. Gonzaga and Purdue have each made two. Kansas State has made four. Oklahoma and Illinois have each made five. It’s not just a matter of not breaking through. Notre Dame doesn’t even get close.
Some of this does come back to timing, and with it luck. Notre Dame was not particularly good in the 40s, or in the 60s, back when Division I was much smaller. Notre Dame also was never given a bye in its early appearances, whereas Kansas State—to pick one counterpart—was always given a bye. 28 of Notre Dame’s 81 tournament games came in the Mike Brey era, when the tournament was at least 65 teams big. Eleven of the other 53 came in first round (i.e., non-bye) games before the tournament expanded to 32 teams, with the Irish picking up seven extra wins that way, many against the likes of Austin Peay and Loyola-Louisiana and Tennessee Tech.
But at the same time, it’s hard to find another program which has demonstrated, historically, a floor as high and a ceiling as low as Notre Dame’s. Texas is the only real counterpart, and Texas’s peaks have been better than those of the Irish even if the tournament performance has been similar. Texas has received a top-4 seed eight times over the last twenty tournaments. Notre Dame has received one of those just twice over the same timeframe.
Is it possible to win a national championship at Notre Dame? Of course it’s possible. Many things are possible. But what these numbers really illustrate, we’d offer, is that Notre Dame’s inability to consistently crack the top ten isn’t just a recent phenomenon. It’s historic. That might just be coincidence. It also might say something about the nature of college basketball in South Bend.
Quick Hitters
Not a lot of news this week (which is part of why we shortened to one opening section instead of two—we may be a one-section pony through the summer), but some bits and pieces:
- Ven-Allen Lubin committed to Vanderbilt.
- Notre Dame’s reportedly targeting Jesse Zarzuela, a rising senior out of Central Michigan. Zarzuela, a guard, has bounced around through five different schools (UTEP, Navarro College, Missouri State-West Plains, Coppin State, and then CMU), and doesn’t grade out great numerically but is drawing interest from Arizona, Oregon, Oklahoma State, and Pitt, among others. It’s unclear how much eligibility Zarzuela has remaining. It’s likely Notre Dame’s in on others we aren’t hearing about, possibly including a lot of one-year flyers beyond just Zarzuela.
This Week
The men’s lacrosse team beat Johns Hopkins in Annapolis yesterday, preserving what was at one point a five-goal lead to beat the Marylanders 12–9. They’ll rematch with Virginia on Saturday in Philadelphia on ESPN2. The winner will meet the winner of Duke and Penn State on Monday in the national championship. The women’s team fell 20–6 at Boston College in the quarterfinals on Thursday, ending their own strong season.
The softball team is also done for the year, falling to regional hosts Arkansas in the loser’s bracket Saturday night after losing to Oregon on Friday and beating Harvard earlier on Saturday afternoon. Oregon ultimately came out of the regional victorious.
The baseball team lost two of three at Boston College last week, finishing the regular season eighth in the ACC. The ACC Tournament is this week in Durham, and the Irish are in a pool with Pitt and Wake Forest. D1 Baseball currently has Notre Dame as the third-to-last team in the NCAA Tournament field, with Pitt seemingly out of the picture and Wake Forest the top team in the country. The upshot of that is that Notre Dame is likely right on the bubble if they beat Pitt and lose to Wake Forest, off the bubble and in the tournament if they beat both, and probably still on the bubble if they get swept but presumably on the wrong side. That’s a bit of a guess, but it’s the best guess we’ve got.
Sebastian Dominko and Connor Fu get to work this week in Orlando, with Dominko beating Henry von der Schulenburg of Harvard in his singles opener today to get to Duke’s Pedro Rodenas in the Round of 32 tomorrow. Also tomorrow, Dominko and Fu will play second overall seed Jake Fearnley and Luc Fomba of TCU to open the doubles tournament. Each will run through Friday, I believe.
Palmer Jackson and Nate Stevens finished tied for 20th and 29th, respectively, at the Bath Regional in men’s golf. Neither advanced to the NCAA Championship.
The track & field team competes in Jacksonville this weekend at the NCAA Regional. That’ll be streamed on ESPN+.
