Notre Dame Fighting Irish lacrosse (4-2) fell at home to Michigan (6-2), 13-12. There was no defeated enemy, the hordes were not driven before us, and we did not hear the lamentations of their women.  Conan would not be impressed.  After two top-10 wins, Wednesday indeed went to the hunter.

Scoring

Ryder Garnsey paced the Irish with five really nice goals and an assist. Costabile had a hat trick, and Byrne had a goal and an assist.  Willets, Sexton, and Wynne added goals, and Gleason added two assists.

Defensively, John Sexton’s stat line stood out again, with 7 ground balls and a caused turnover to go with his goal.  Travisano was the strongest option at faceoff winning 12 of 20.

Notre Dame won the ground ball, turnover, clearing, and shot battles.

For Michigan, our players to watch combined for 8 goals and 3 assists.  We regret that we seem to know what we’re talking about.  We’d rather have been wrong.

The Plot

Michigan got up, the Irish caught up.  Michigan went up again, and the Irish caught up again.  This repeated over and over with the Irish never being able to nose ahead.  Eventually, time ran out.  That’s basically it.

Analysis

It’s going to be a hard day in the video room.  The Wolverines did not come to South Bend and blow the doors off the Irish.  Michigan worked a bit harder and the Irish, frankly, handed them gift after gift.  Notre Dame never gave up on the game, but you can’t hand any team in the country 13 goals and be comfortable with your chance to win.

Our observations in no particular order, both good and bad:

  • Although Garnsey dominated with 5 goals, scoring was the most balanced it has been all year.  This is important, as it has had been either/or scoring to this point.
  • Wynne had a tough day going 1 for 7 in his shots.  Odd are extremely strong that he won’t have this stat line ever again in his life.  Even mediocre scoring luck for Wynne and the Irish win going away.
  • The defense got caught ball watching a lot.  Michigan’s Noseworthy is 6’5″, his presence alone on the crease should not have gone unnoticed as many times as it did.  There was also a lot of poor technique in the approaches with quite a few wild lunges at attacking players.  Very uncharacteristic for this crew.
  • Lack of hustle backing up shots and some lazy one-handed ground ball efforts directly led to Michigan goals.  This will drive the coaches nuts.  A few basic effort plays and the result is different.  This, admittedly, frustrates us.  We are not saying there was no effort, far from it, but the handful of lapses in concentration where horribly punitive.
  • Here at Team ND-Atl, we are very sensitive to goalie issues, and we are perhaps overly protective of them.  Coach Corrigan knows more about lacrosse than we will ever know, but pulling a goalie in a 1-goal game is an incredible gamble.  Schmidt, while far from perfect, was still close to 50% and only one goal down.  Molloy went in cold and was asked to make stops against a volume-shooting offense.  He saved two and gave up eight, well below the rate of the player he replaced.  We concede it’s the role of the backup to be ready, and that being average would have won the game, but that’s not easy to do consistently coming in cold.  We are troubled by the decision as Molloy would have to be over 50% to improve on Schmidt, and that was unlikely under the circumstances, so we don’t see the benefit.
  • Travisano is doing well at faceoff but needs more help from Hyland and Leonard.  Modern faceoffs are brutal affairs, and Travisano begins to lose effectiveness after 15 or so battles.  His teammates need to help him with the slack.
  • Sexton gathered ground balls at an incredible rate, but in the absence of a highlight tape we’ll include this:

  • Garnsey’s mojo is back, and this presents the coaching staff with an incredible array of scoring options with Garnsey, Wynn, Gleason, and Willets at the attack.  This excites us for the rest of the season.  We enjoyed watching Garnsey communicate with Wynne in his various scoring efforts.

 

This ramifications of this game are difficult to assess.  It’s Michigan, so many fans will be annoyed at the crowing about a program-defining win.  We have to admit we were in this camp this afternoon, we hate ceding anything to the Wolverines.  But it is also true that a win by the Irish would not have added much to their playoff resume.  Let’s just call it a reminder that the game punishes any and all lapses in concentration.  Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.

Up next for the Irish is a trip to Columbus for a Sunday game against Ohio State.  Another short preparation period and a difficult venue.

#GoIrish