Our #1 Notre Dame Fighting Irish men’s lacrosse (8-1, 2-0 ACC) defeated the #8 Cornell Big Red (7-4, 3-1 Ivy), in an 18-17 shootout in front of over 7000 fans on Long Island. A Ben Ramsey goal with 6 seconds remaining sealed the result for the Irish.

The Plot

Cornell got on the board on the first possession with a goal by Ryan Goldstein, assisted by C.J. Kirst.  Pat Kavanagh responded quickly for the Irish, followed by a man-up goal by Jeffery Ricciardelli and a goal from Eric Dobson (both assisted by PKav).

The fans quickly saw the game was going to be a scrappy affair, with both teams generating good looks from determined efforts.  The Irish ended the quarter up 6-3, but Cornell looked dangerous.

Jordan Faison scored to open the 2nd quarter and extend the Irish lead to 4.  The teams exchanged 8 goals over the remainder of the quarter with the Irish holding the same 4 goal cushion at the half, 11-7. Will Donavan’s pole goal to put the Irish up 4 to end the half was particularly memorable.

The obvious halftime questions was how either defense was going to be able to keep up. The one coming up with the slightly better solution seemed likely to find victory.

Cornell scored 2 at the start of the second half, but their momentum was blunted by another Agent Zero man-up goal. However, they quickly regained the initiative and strung together 4 more goals to but the Big Red up 1, 12-13. Jake Taylor and PKav scored to end the 3rd quarter with the Irish back up 14-13.

The 4th quarter was intense. Cornell tied early in the quarter, but Eric Dobson responded to retake the lead.

Cornell then scored 2 more to retake the lead, with the Irish offense suddenly becoming silent. It was an uncomfortable period, as the Irish, who until this point had little difficulty scoring, found themselves in a 9-minute drought.

Jake Taylor finally evened the scores, but within a minute Cornell retook the lead with 3 minutes remaining. CKav wasted no time and tied it back up 15 seconds later.

The teams were showing the stress of the last two minutes with many unforced turnovers and errors (*it also appears a few greasers inexplicably made it into the game). The Irish had the ball late and seemed ready to set up a final play, but a turnover sent the ball the other way with Cornell readying for a final shot.

Jordan Faison came to the rescue with a well-timed stick check to caused a turnover and send the ball back to the Irish offensive zone.  A few nervy passes and the ball found its way to Ben Ramsey for a step-down shot and goal with just 6 seconds left! The Irish held on in the next faceoff to leave the field as victors!

The Scoring

Pat (2g, 2a) and Chris (1g, 3a) led Notre Dame scorers, with Dobson and Taylor each recording hat tricks.

Agent Zero and Reilly Gray added 2 goals each, and Jordan Faison had a goal and an assist to go along with his 2 caused turnovers. Donovan, Harris, Ramsay, and Busenkell had a goal each. Hagstrom and McLane each had an assist.

Liam Entenmann gained sole possession of the top of the Notre Dame career save list with his 13 saves.

The faceoff unit was slightly ahead of Cornell (20 of 38), with Colin Hagstrom posted a figure of 13 of 21.

It probably shouldn’t be a surprise given the the game was decided in the final seconds in a high-scoring game, but the efficiency metrics calculated by Lacrossereference.com were nearly identical, with Cornell having a slight edge in total possession time and length of possession.

Our Pregame Question

Leading into this contest, we noted just one issue, that Cornell would try to draw Notre Dame into a wild shooting match, and that the Irish needed to avoid this.  Unfortunately, Cornell got what it wanted.  Fortunately, Notre Dame won anyway.

We discuss three observations that we expect the Irish to work on in practice to avoid having the remaining teams on their schedule look to the Cornell game as a blueprint.

Going in to this game, Notre Dame had a clear statistical advantage over Cornell at the faceoff dot. The Big Red countered by making each faceoff into a physical scrum, particularly Marc Psyllos. The opponent was probably satisfied bring faceoffs to parity in this manner. We don’t understand the dark arts of faceoffs well enough to opine what may have happened, but it appeared to us that the unit was a bit surprised by the physicality Cornell brought to the exercise.

On defense, Cornell seemed to be very successful in isolating our SSDMs against their top offensive threats, and even with this success, the Irish still seemed willing to allow these switches. It’s not a big secret that the Irish aren’t particularly worried about matchups, but the boys seemed troubled by the manner in which Cornell was able to switch both on- and off-ball, and never got to a level of comfort with it (as evidenced by 17 goals allowed). Granted, Cornell may be the only team with the personnel to pull this off (C.J. Kirst is indeed special in this regard), but it was unusual to see the Irish unable to fully adjust.

On offense, the long stretch in the 3rd quarter where the Irish found difficulty scoring was uncomfortable. The boys seemed to have a patch like this in many of their recent games. The good news is that they always seem to recover, but against Cornell the recovery wasn’t very polished or confident. The quality of the balls in play may have had something to do with it, but it was troubling seeing 5 4th quarter turnovers and less than half of their shots being on goal in the final quarter.

Now that we put all these out there, the fact remains that even with all this to worry the Irish, they still won their top-10 matchup.  Not many teams can say they have a pretty big list of things to work on in practice and still walk away with a win against a premier offense. Our guess is that future opponents will try to replicate Cornell’s strategy and look to generate a lot of switches to confuse the Irish defense. We are sure the Irish will be prepared, and we doubt they will make the same mistakes twice.

Up Next

Notre Dame hosts ACC rival North Carolina at Arlotta on April 20.  It’s an unusually early start: 11:30 am (ACCN). We will try to have a preview up soon.

Also: we have a special interview to post as soon as our colleagues in the football writers’ room get their Blue/Gold game material up. We are very excited to be able to present one of our favorite lacrosse athletes to you and hope you will enjoy it!

#GoIrish

ND-Atl 2.0