The Notre Dame Fighting Irish men’s lacrosse team defeated Johns Hopkins in the NCAA quarterfinals in Annapolis, 12-9.  The Irish advance to the Final Four on Memorial Day weekend!

Notre Dame will face their nemesis, the Virginia Cavaliers, in the national semifinal on Saturday at 2:30 at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia (ESPN2). It will be the Irish’s 6th trip to the Final Four.

The Plot

The game weekend began with one of our favorite Notre Dame lacrosse traditions, the road graduation.  The program’s regular success on the field has meant most classes miss the opportunity to participate in the on-campus commencement. The team’s tradition is for the seniors to graduate on the road with their teammates. This year, our graduates received a commencement address from Admiral Christopher Grady, himself a Notre Dame Alumnus (’84).

The Irish had a few good looks at the goal to start the game and will rightly consider themselves unlucky not to have blasted the game wide open early. Instead, Johns Hopkins opened the scoring with a Nick Kaufman goal in transition a few minutes into the game. Jack Simmons responded quickly for Notre Dame, followed by a man-up CKav goal on the patented inside-out move through Ricciardelli.

Hopkins scored the next to tie it back up and the teams exchanged goals until Jalen Seymour stretched out to catch a pass from Dobson and score the goal to put the Irish up 4-3 to end the 1st.

It didn’t take long to figure out that the Blue Jays were going to sell out to keep PKav off the scoresheet. They had Scott Smith tie up the nation’s leading point producer and supported him with lots of help. PKav for his part kept up as much pressure as he could knowing that he would be opening up opportunities for the other 5 in the offensive set to manufacture goals.

Hopkins tied it up again to open the 2nd quarter, but the Irish scored the next three (CKav, Dobson and Simmons again) to finally stretch out the lead.  Two Blue Jay goals early in the 3rd made the fans a bit worried, but Taylor, Simmons (hat trick), Taylor again, and Seymour again put the game out of reach at 11-6.

Notre Dame noticeably took the air out of the ball very early in the 4th quarter and extended their possessions intending to end the game as soon as possible. Hopkins couldn’t make the progress they needed to against the stout Irish defense. The game ended without much drama (other than a big Entenmann save after a late Hopkins goal). The scoreboard had the Irish up 12-9 and heading to Philadelphia.

The Scoring

Jack Simmons and Chris Kavanagh topped the scoresheet with 3 goals and an assist each. Jake Taylor also had a hat trick. Jalen Seymour had 2 goals, and Eric Dobson had a goal and 2 assists. Pat Kavanagh and Jeff Ricciardelli had an assist.

Notre Dame had a big shot advantage, 43 to 31.

Chris Conlin led the defensive stat sheet  with 4 ground balls and a caused turnover. Liam Entenmann was solid again with 10 saves.

The Irish were 8 of 24 at faceoff X, led by Lynch’s 8 of 19 (and going over 50% in the second half).

The Irish had a big efficiency advantage, 33.3% to 24.3% for Johns Hopkins. It was nearly 40% until the team decided to shut it down to win the game. The boys also had an untidy 16 turnovers, which is hard to reconcile with the high offensive efficiency.

Melendez, Degnon, Collison and Peshko each had 2 goals for the Blue Jays.

Thoughts

We didn’t post our usual three questions and instead left it with the hope that the Irish will simply play well and keep the game out of reach in the fourth quarter.  The lads checked those boxes.

Did they play their best game? Not really, but considering the moment it was a very good effort. Looking at it from a different perspective, the Irish controlled a top-10 opponent with a less than top performance and a few mistakes to clean up. They will be scary when playing at their best.

The Blue Jays were determined and threw a defensive wrinkle at the Irish that we didn’t expect. As mentioned above, they used their best defender, Scott Smith, and tried to lock out Pat Kavanagh. The theory seems to have been to try to make the Irish play 5-on-5. Some may suggest the tactic was effective in pointing to the scorecard showing PKav with only an assist for the game.  The reality is that sacrificing your best defender (PKav also made sure he needed lots help from his Blue Jay teammates, by the way), left chaos behind him on defense.  Notre Dame is far too balanced for that gimmick.  Some coaches may disagree, but we feel defense is much harder to play with 5 players than offense.  The Hopkins strategy didn’t hurt the Notre Dame efficiency in any appreciable way.

There wasn’t a lot of perfection, as noted above.  The faceoff unit took a while to find balance, and it took some time for the offense to decode what Hopkins was trying to do. The defense will be generally satisfied with only giving up 9 goals, but there were a handful of communication breakdowns, and they will also recognize they got lucky on a few unsettled situations.  These aren’t mistakes you can make against Virginia without consequences.

On the positive side of things, the Irish found a way to activate Dobson even with Hopkins covering him with a pole. Had his aim been a bit sharper, the game would have been a complete blowout.  This is a good sign as he got very good looks and wasn’t afraid to shoot.

The defensive unit didn’t have a lot of trouble clearing the ball against Hopkins’ riding pressure and 10-man late in the game. When the Blue Jays became desperate to get possessions and sold out trying to prevent clears, the Irish were largely unbothered.  This confidence will be helpful against the Wahoos on Saturday.

Next

We’ll get a formal preview out later in the week. The Irish are soooo close. But they only have a week to figure our Virginia, who have given the boys a really hard time.  But we don’t think this Irish team would want it any other way.

As always, don’t forget to read our friend Drew Brennan’s account of the game at One Foot Down, and all the writers following Notre Dame lacrosse!

#GoIrish