Now that we’ve all recovered from watching Notre Dame escape a way-more-nerve-wracking-than-it-should-be game against annoying Boston College, we’ve got a minute to step back and look at the big picture. Before our attention turns to NC State, let’s take a quick national look and see how the Irish shape up. We’ll see if we can’t figure out what might be in store for them in March.

Admittedly, this look is a little bit less important given where the Irish currently fall. Right now, they’re in the dead zone of 5-7 seeds, between “bubble team, needing wins or help” and “top tier team hoping to start their run close to home”. Hoping things can break right and we luck into a 4 seed isn’t all that exciting but there are still plenty of things to watch down the stretch. Let’s start with the first two weekends in March.

The ACC

While Charlie Weis’ “sitting at home eating cheeseburgers” line was meant for bye weeks, it could very well represent a full 2 week stretch of Notre Dame’s ACC schedule. Headed into the week, the Irish had by far the easiest schedule remaining of any ACC contender, with the season ending game at Louisville as the only elite level match-up left. Despite the fact that Notre Dame sits in 5th place, there’s some room for upward mobility.

Using Ken Pomeroy’s ranking / predictions (www.kenpom.com) and some math, we’ve mapped out the chances that each of the top 9 teams finishes with each record. Notre Dame has a 56% chance of entering the Louisville tilt at 12-5. If we can pull off the upset there, we’ll be in great shape yet another top 4 finish and double bye. This is the point where you likely start grumbling about our buzzer beating loss to Georgia Tech, and I can’t blame you. The more these scenarios play out, the clearer it is that one additional win could mean a great deal.

Scenarios

If you’re looking for rooting scenarios, as always, it depends on what you want. Unfortunately, we won’t win many tiebreakers that matters, so we’re going to need some help along the way.

  • If you want the double bye in the ACC tournament, Notre Dame winning out should be enough, and 12-6 likely won’t get it done, but you can root for Duke to fail (because you can always root for Duke to fail) as well as Virginia to keep losing.
  • If you want a share of the ACC title, root for UNC to drop their game against Louisville and at least one of their games against Virginia. Then root for FSU and Duke to each drop one more as well, plus us to win-out. Shared titles count as titles in the ACC, so a logjam at 13-5 works great!
  • The best-case scenario for the Irish is that they steal the 1 seed in the ACC tournament. We can get there by way of a 3-way tie with Louisville and 1 of Florida St, Duke or North Carolina. 4-way ties or any ties without Louisville in the mix start to go badly, though, so only those specific ones’ work.

ACC Tournament – Barclay’s Center, Brooklyn, NY

Once Regular season play is wrapped up, the Irish will head to The Barclays center in Brooklyn for the 2017 installment of the ACC Tournament. The scenarios above outline some of the spots where they could land, but in general, most results have Notre Dame hanging out somewhere between the 3 and 6 lines. If the Irish end up with the 5 or 6 seed, their tournament will start on Wednesday, March 8th and if they can grab a higher seed, it will begin on Thursday, March 9th.

The double bye would be a nice touch for a team whose starters play the most minutes in the league. Three games in as many nights against the cream of the ACC crop is hard enough as it is. Adding a 4th game to that, even against a bottom feeder, is a lot to ask for from this team.

In past years, the Irish have sometimes wanted that extra game against a beatable bubble team to pad their tournament resume before selection Sunday. This year is not one of those years. The Irish currently have a wealth of wins against mid-ranged competition from both non-conference and conference play. Wins over Northwestern, Iowa, Colorado to go along with ones against the 6 ACC teams ranked between 34 and 70 in KP leave us flush in that category.

For what it’s worth, the 2/7 and 3/6 side of the bracket plays at night, while the 1/8 and 4/5 side plays in the afternoon, so plan your schedule accordingly.

NCAA Tournament

As mentioned above, the Irish are a lock for their 3rd straight NCAA tournament appearance. Most projections currently slate the Irish as a 5 or 6 seed with a few weeks left to play. Obviously, a great deal of movement will still happen between now and then, but by this time of the season, we have enough of a general feel for each team to make some reliable predictions. No ranking tool is perfect, but again we’ll be using KenPom rankings on team resume discussion.

Let’s start with where we’d like the Irish to land.  If the Irish go on a run, the Irish could find themselves opening up on Thursday in Milwaukee or Friday in Indianapolis. Either would be a nice, close venue, but it’s worth remembering that Banker’s Life Fieldhouse in Indianapolis has been a bit of a house of horrors for the Irish in recent years. If ND can’t climb to the 3 line, they will be subject to the committee’s whims on where they head.

From the perspective of rooting for tournament success, again, it depends on what you want. If your goal is making the final four (or further!), the higher the seed the better. This is also true if your criteria of success is just a single win.

However, if you have your sights set on the Irish making their third straight elite 8, you should be rooting for Notre Dame to land on the 3 or the 6 line. Given the 4/5’s proximity in the bracket to the always-scary #1 seeds, the 5 spot actually makes less Elite 8’s than the 6 or 7 seeds below them.

So, can they climb all the way to a 3 seed?

Barring a win over Louisville, followed by a ACC tournament run, the answer is probably not without a lot of help. While the easy stretch run is a blessing in many ways, it also means the Irish are fairly locked out in their top end potential. The Irish are 9-1 against mid-tier teams, which is impressive, but with a 2-6 record against the KP top 15 (yes, 8 games vs. the top 15 so far!) and the Irish could use some heft if they want to climb into the top 3 seeds.

Currently, there are 6 other teams with resumes almost identical to Notre Dame. Florida, Kentucky, Arizona, Oregon, Wisconsin and Purdue. These teams are a combined 4-12 against the KP top 15 but an impressive 68-15 against everyone else in the top 100. Those teams will be scattered around the 2-7 lines come Selection Sunday, but the ones that get the best spots will have done it by picking up a few more good wins along the way.

Clearly, the Irish are right at home in that pack of teams, but the large number of games with little to show for it sticks out. Would another (single) win over a #5 Louisville be enough to close some of the gap?

More Comparisons

Additionally, there’s a set of teams whose resumes look nothing like the consistency of the 7 teams listed above. West Virginia and Butler, plus FSU and Duke to a lesser extent, all take the opposite approach. They’ve each coughed up ugly games to bad teams but have flexed their muscles, beating some of the country’s best.

It remains to be seen how the committee will handle these resumes in comparison to the relative normalcy of the ones listed above, but if any of them get (or stay, in Duke’s case) hot, don’t be surprised to see each of these teams over-seeded by a little bit.

Prediction

So the final question – where will the Irish land at the end of the regular season?

I’ll hedge this prediction by really giving two. If the Irish can knock off Louisville on March 4th, I think they’ll land the 3 seed in the ACC Tournament. There, they will finally get the Virginia monkey off their back in the 3-6 game. At that point, the Irish will wind up as a 4 seed in the NCAAT and we’ll all yell that they deserved better.

If the Irish can’t knock off Louisville, they will land as the 5 seed in the ACC Tournament. There they will get their revenge on Duke in the 4/5 match up before a rematch of last year’s ACC semis when we get UNC again. In this scenario, the Irish likely end up with a 6 seed if they can’t get past UNC. But we’ll probably have the benefit of being all over everyone’s tournament sleeper watch!