The 2024 men’s lacrosse season is about to start for our defending national champion Notre Dame Fighting Irish!

The schedule has been made official and includes a return of the ACC Tournament. The first scrimmage is in the books with the Irish already looking strong.

But even with the strength of the Irish returning roster and their championship, we hear Coach Corrigan’s annual reminder: every season is a new team.  Players have graduated, returning players are a year more experience, injured players are healthy, new talent has arrived.

With this in mind we open our season coverage with some peculiar details of this team and what the keys to its success will be. We’ve reduced it to four thoughts:

Adjusting for graduated players

The good news is Notre Dame is returning the overwhelming bulk of its 2023 contributing roster. The challenging news is that while there are a lot of familiar faces, the changes are enough to fundamentally alter the type of team they will be. On the defensive end, Chris Fake’s particular skill set is not easy to replace (more on this later), but what we are specifically referring to is the graduation of Brian Tevlin and Quinn McCahon.

We have long agreed with Terry Foy of Inside Lacrosse that there is a new prototype of midfielder emerging that is particularly influential to the wins of teams who have this type of player. The 2023 team was blessed with two premier examples of versatile midfielder who can not only contribute to all aspects of the game, but is critical to the team’s success in all aspects of the game. In large part it is because their versatility allow the players on the field to seamlessly blend from defense to offense, offense to defense, faceoff to offense, etc.  The Irish are replacing not one, but two, top-flight examples of this critical style of player.

We imagine a lot will be asked of players like Ben Ramsey to lean into some of the offensive skills he showed last year to grow into the two-way style of his teammates of last year. Perhaps another will emerge, but we’ll see how the coaches Moneyball similar output.  What the 2024 team has is incredible depth at midfielder and elsewhere.  Depth is its own strength and gives coaches a nearly endless array of options for this team to develop its own alternatives.  We’re excited to see what they do.

Motivation

We’ve read criticism suggesting this team will not be the same without the “revenge” factor of the 2022 snub.  We think this wildly misreads what motivated the team to a championship. As Coach Corrigan was careful to say, it wasn’t about revenge or getting back at anyone, but that the experience was a reminder that a successful team can’t leave anything to chance. They experienced what can happen when you leave the choice to someone else, and they understood that they had control of their destiny through their focus and effort.

We like to think the 2024 team doesn’t need the negative motivation to keep focus and effort. They have a far greater positive motivation to maintain intensity. The returning players now know the intoxicating joy of winning, and the desire to experience more of that is a powerful motivator. Even as fans, we want to experience Philadelphia again.

Why aren’t we worried about the absence of “revenge”?  It’s because the experience of winning changes a team, a player, a program, and a university, forever. The boys know the joy their effort can bring.

But…overconfidence

One of the biggest worries of fans of championship teams is that overconfidence will creep in. As our old coach here in Atlanta would tells us after an emotional win, “let’s be careful not to start enjoying the smell of our own farts.”  No team is perfect, even a team as stacked as the Irish. There will be a constant need to examine and improve.

The good news is that we think the boys got the message this fall when Princeton wasn’t intimidated by the Irish’s 2023 success. From fall interviews and podcasts, it seems the players got the message that in 2024 they are going to get everyone’s best shot.

Some specific issues

Notre Dame’s path runs through the ACC. There’s a good chance they will have to face the 2023 Tewaaraton winner, #2 Duke’s Brennan O’Neil, as many as three times.  The same with #3 Virginia’s 2023 Tewaaraton finalist Connor Shellenberger. Syracuse’s incredible young players are a year more experienced. And to make things even more interesting, the last of the big four attackmen of the NCAA, 2023 Tewaaraton finalist C.J. Kirst is also on the schedule.

The Irish found solutions for all the challenges on their 2023 schedule. Specifically as to Duke, it was handy that Chris Fake was Brennan O’Neil’s kryptonite. This year the boys will need to find new solutions to these challenges, particularly because their performance in the ACC will have an even greater impact on their prospects than it did last year. The announcement of Chris Conlin’s return and the emergence of freshman Shawn Lyght, along with the rest of the returning army of defensemen, give reason for great confidence.  How Coach Corrigan and Coach Wellner utilize these great resources against this difficult schedule will be fascinating.

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We’re excited for a fun season. We didn’t get much of a break as the boys were frequent guests on shows like The Pat McAfee Show, and we had the great football/lacrosse crossover with Jordan Faison, Sam Assaf, and the return of Tyler Buchner.

Up next for the Irish is a scrimmage versus Utah on Saturday, followed by a final scrimmage versus Detroit Mercy the following weekend during coaching clinic weekend.

We’ll try to introduce the Irish freshmen soon.

Please remember to follow our coverage of the 2024 Notre Dame team, along with the coverage of our friend Drew Brennan at OneFootDown and Exit 77 podcast, as well as the Twitter/X updates of the always-insightful David Brogan.

#GoIrish

ND-Atl 2.0