The now #1 Notre Dame Fighting Irish men’s lacrosse dominated the then-#1 Duke Blue Devils, 17-12, on a beautiful Saturday at Arlotta Stadium. The Irish are at the top of all polls going into their bye week.

The Plot

After weeks of playing in miserable weather, the boys and their fans were greeted by 60 degree temps and a sunny sky.

The teams exchanged scoreless possessions with the expected matchups of Fake/O’Neill and Conlin/McAdorey coming into focus. Duke opened with a goal a few minutes into the game.

On the other end of the field, it was also becoming clear that Duke was going to have challenges dealing with the Irish ride.

Eric Dobson scored for the Irish three minutes into the game (to our estimation, the 7th time this season he has opened the scoring). Duke tried defending him with a short stick midfielder, and to quote ESPN play-by-play announcer Anish Schroff, “Dobson said come along for a ride.”

The teams were in a stalemate for much of the rest of the quarter until broken by a Duke goal, followed quickly by a Jake Taylor goal, and then another Duke goal to put the visitors up 3-2 at the end of the first.  It was becoming clear that the Irish were focused on keeping the Duke attack off the scoreboard and to take their chances with the Blue Devil midfield.

Ben Ramsay tied it up on a fast break soon into the second quarter, followed by a Chris Kavanagh goal to take the lead.

A few minutes later the Irish put on a show with an amazing Taylor to Pat Kavanagh goal to beat the shot clock.

The Irish scored two more before Duke’s Dyson Williams tried to stop the bleeding. But PKav, CKav and Dobson followed with goals quickly to put the Irish up 9-4 at the half and with all the momentum.

A Dobson missile seconds into the third quarter continued the assault that ended the second, but Duke regrouped to score 5 of the next 7 goals to get within 3 of the Irish and cause a little bit of concern.

But then PKav backed down the much larger Kenny Brower and snuck in a goal that deflated the Blue Devils.  Three more goals by CKav sandwiched around a nice Reilly Gray goal extended the lead to 17-9 with a half quarter to play.  The boys coasted in to a final of 17-12.

The Scoring

The Kavanaghs are the top of the sheet with PKav’s  3g, 5a performance (along with 5 gbs!!), and CKav’s 5 goals. Dobson’s hat trick and an assist, along with Taylor’s 2g, 1a score line were also critical.

Jack Simmons (1g, 2a) and Reilly Gray (1g, 1a) kept the defense from being able to support the interior, and Tevlin and Ramsay had goals exploiting transition opportunities.

Chris Fake was dominant with 3 ground balls and 2 caused turnovers.  The LSM trio were fantastic as well with Boyer (2 gb, 1 ct), Donovan (3 gb, 1 ct) and Burgmaster (1 gb).

Entenmann was solid and consistent from beginning to end with 15 saves.

The Irish were a perfect 23 of 23 clearing the ball and had only 9 turnovers. This helped result in Notre Dame having more offensive possessions than Duke even with their 22 of 33 faceoff wins.

Man-up was 1 for 2 opportunities, and man-down allowed two goals in 5 Duke opportunities (It was surprising to see Duke’s Jake Naso’s diving inability to stand).

Ground balls were equal on the scoresheet, but excluding faceoffs yielded the Irish a 23-19 advantage.

Lacrossereference.com calculated 43.6% offensive efficiency to go along with 31.6% defensive efficiency against the vaunted Duke attack!

The bench was very short against Duke, with 22 Irish seeing the field. Duke wasn’t much more expansive with 24 players.

Our Pregame Questions

Let’s review our thoughts going into the game:

  1. Consistent, balanced offense: This end of the field did as well as we could have hoped. It took a few minutes to get rolling and it was Kavanagh-focused, but this latter part was the product of Dobson, Simmons, Taylor and others requiring the attention of the Duke defense.  Brower was on an island because he had to be.
  2. Defensive control: It’s hard to overstate the level of execution of the defensive plan.  Chris Fake is rightfully getting all the player of the week accolades for his fantastic defense of O’Neil, but we can’t overlook Chris Conlin’s control over McAdorey, which in turn, minimized the opportunities for Dyson Williams. Of course, allowing Fake and Conlin to focus on their one-on-one responsibilities wouldn’t have worked without the SSDMs and LSMs doing their jobs with minimal slide help. Notre Dame typically sends help fairly early. The strategy against Duke was a departure from their norm, and it was great to see them be able to execute so effectively.
  3. Keep momentum at faceoff: The 11 for 33 faceoff stat does not remotely do Lynch and Hagstrom justice. Their wings were a great help, of course, but the faceoff specialists did a lot of the hard work keeping Naso from creating anything from his wins. Certainly, outright faceoff wins are ideal, but making sure every opponent win ends in stalemate isn’t a bad plan B.

Thoughts

PKav limped off the field with about 4 minutes to play and the result secure.  We haven’t heard anything definitive about it and hope it’s not anything a bye week can’t resolve.

Speaking of PKav, we are ashamed to admit it took this battle with Kenny Brower to appreciate the nuance of the PKav dodge/redodge/redodge again. There were two flavors on display. The first was when he had Brower on an island. Pat Kavanagh would keep bodying up until he felt the defender switch to defending the left with his stick, and then it was a rollback to his right to shoot from a hidden position. That’s not easy, but it’s so clever.  The second flavor was to occupy the eyes of the rest of the defense by battling Brower until CKav could generate a switch to a short stick defender on the backside, and then get it to CKav with this mismatch in place. Both require tremendous physical work to create a subtle, but powerful, advantage.

With Nick Harris out of the lineup due to injury, Coach Corrigan had to shorten the SSDM rotation to Tevlin, McCahon, Ramsay and Parlette.  They were supremely effective, but coach was not wrong in his post-game comments that the priority during the bye week is to find another midfielder on the roster ready to play defense at that level.

In addition to the great SSDM play, the LSM effort was its equal.  Boyer, Burgmaster and Donovan kept constant pressure on the Duke midfield both from the wings and in settled defense. This did a lot to keep the workload on the short sticks to a manageable level.

Duke’s 19 for 21 clearing state severely understates the effectiveness and impact of the Notre Dame ride led by PKav and CKav.  They forced Duke to play so conservatively that the idea of them generating any transition offense was fantasy.

Future

A short schedule involved a lot of risk for this team, but now that the boys have proven themselves against the best, the wisdom of a weekends-only schedule with a perfectly placed bye week has come into focus. Every team is battling injury, but the Irish have done well to keep incidents to a minimum. The team will have the week to rest recover for the final quarter of the regular season.

What comes next is the very difficult stretch of UNC-UVa-UNC, with the last two being on the road. UNC has quietly entered the top-10 on the strength of their supremely efficient defense. They’ve held the top statistical spot on defense all season, and hold it by a big margin. And obviously, the rematch at Virginia looms large.  Every facet of the team will be tested in this final push.

Please also take a look at our colleague Drew Brennan’s wrapup.

 

#GoIrish