Our #2/#2/#1 Notre Dame Fighting Irish (5-1) welcome the #18 Michigan Wolverines (5-2) to Arlotta Stadium for a 2:00 Saturday game (ACC Network). It will be the “Irish Wear Green” game, and the fans attending the game will be given a replica national championship banner.
This week’s preview will be short and sweet: beat Michigan.
The Opponent
Notre Dame is 5-1 all-time versus Michigan, including an 18-8 win in Ann Arbor last year over the 2023 Big 10 champions. The Wolverines come into this game with wins over Canisius (21-5), Hobart (18-8), Marquette (20-12), Jacksonville (13-10) and #19 Delaware (13-8). They opened their season with a loss to #3 Virginia (11-19), and they lost last weekend in Ann Arbor to Coach Gerry Byrne’s #19 Harvard (11-13).
Once again, the key matchup will occur in the middle of the field between the Notre Dame tandem of Will Lynch and Colin Hagstrom against Michigan’s Justin Weitfeldt. One of the peculiarities of the Irish schedule is that the boys will play the all of the top NCAA faceoff athletes, and this week is no different with Weitfeldt (63%). The tandem of Weitfeldt and Rowlett got off to a hot start in last year’s game, but the Irish fought back to a stalemate the final three quarters and stifled any hope of a comeback.
Our Three Questions
Nothing fancy this week. Our focus items are the straight-forward effort and discipline elements that win games.
- Controlling transition: Against Ohio State our offensive midfielders were frequently caught in transition and trapped on defense which kept the Buckeyes in the game. The boys will need to control the transition game to limit these situations as much as possible.
- Defensive control: This Michigan team has a multitude of offensive threats with the likes of #44 Justin Tiernan (28g 3a), #5 Michael Boehm (17g 16a), and #40 Ryan Cohen (17g 15a). Our defense will need to keep them in check and stop them from going on runs to control and win the game. In last year’s game our defense limited this unit to taking shots to Entenmann’s strengths, leading to a 13-save performance.
- Offensive rhythm: This Michigan defense is nothing to sneeze at, led by Princeton transfer #9 Cathal Roberts (13 CTO). The boys will need to get into a rhythm early on to keep this defense on their heels and control the game. Key to this is balanced production from all the midfield lines like they got last week in Columbus.
It’s Michigan, the boys don’t need extra motivation to want to beat these guys!
As part of your pregame prep, please also listen to our colleagues Drew Brennan and Dave Brogan on the Exit 77 podcase previewing this match.
#GoIrish
ND-Atl 2.0
Box score seems to say (to my neophyte understanding of the game) that this was a total rout…maybe they were lucky to score as much as they did?
The boys had an OK start to the game then shifted gears and were absolutely ruthless the rest of the way. Michigan played well TBF, but whatever opportunities they had were convincingly shut down by Entenmann.