The #4/#5 Notre Dame Fighting Irish men’s lacrosse (1-0) team welcomes the #3/#3 Georgetown Hoyas (2-0) to Arlotta Stadium today at 1:00 (ACCNX). 28-degree temps and 14 mph winds will welcome the teams at the opening faceoff.

The Opponent

The Hoyas have one of the best defenses in lacrosse and will be a serious test for the fast-paced Notre Dame offense that was in full flow last weekend against Detroit Mercy. Goalie Owen McElroy won the 2021 Ensign C. Markland Kelly Award and is already in top form.  Gibson Smith, Will Bowen and James Donaldson are as good of a long pole trio as there is in college lacrosse. It will be exciting to see what the boys can do against them.

Georgetown has also embraced the transfer portal with names like the above-mentioned Will Bowen, as well as Alex Trippi and Colin Munro.  Of great interest to Irish fans will be starting attackman and recent Notre Dame graduate, Connor Morin. We are excited to see how he plays in his new environment.

Dylan Watson leads their scorers with 8 goals, and Graham Bundy tops them with 9 points. They are followed by Morin with 5 points.

Notre Dame leads the all-time series, 9-7, with wins in the last two contests held in Frisco, Texas (2017) and Kennesaw, Georgia (2016).  Georgetown comes into this came with quality wins over #16 Johns Hopkins and #10 Penn.

What we’re watching

It’s only the second game for the Irish, so we haven’t yet formulated season trends, but for starters, we’ll be curious about these issues:

  1. Attack: The fast-paced attack will be adding two layers of difficulty this week playing against a good defense and in less than ideal weather conditions. We are excited to see what they can do but have to recognize it will take tremendous concentration to have consistent success against the Hoyas.  This may seem obvious, but long stretches without goals really need to be avoided.
  2. Midfield: Who the coaching staff sends out as a first, second and potentially, third, midfield line will be of interest. With Mirer rumored to be coming back, where he fits in with McCahon appearing to take on a more two-way role will sort out a lot of these questions.
  3. Depth: Related to the midfield issue, we’ll see which players get called to play the various roles against a very good team. For this question we are looking at the bottom-line number of total players seeing the field.  With a 60+ player roster, there are at least 40 which are developed to the point they could legitimately see the field against the #3 team. From this group, it will be interesting if the coaching staff looks to play 30+ guys, or if they mirror the shorter 20-ish rosters of the previous few seasons. The team had the talent to play 30, and we hope they do.

Let’s get it on

This game begins a stretch where the boys will play 7 games against ranked teams, an half of these against top-5 teams.  We are excited to see what they can do.

#GoIrish