Second half convinced me they didn't quit,bbarely. But way out coached and out played. ND had trouble scoring other times and it was never addressed just depended on defense. Wrong answer!
The penalties were unacceptable. Fix their play or bench them.
If Kevin can't get an offense with the speed and talent he has then get an assistant who can or retire. This and the two UVA losses have me wondering.
I invite you to read the rest of this thread, and maybe get outside and take a walk. Enjoy nature for a little bit.
Who the hell does he think he is finishing runner up in the title game? And this, after going 12-2 in the NCAA playoff over the past four years? Is that supposed to impress me? Top recruiting classes, two Tewaraaton winners in the past three years. F that. You gotta beat Virginia muchacho. Beating number 1 Richmond and number 1 UNC in consecutive weeks? Ancient history.
He should be ashamed to win the ACC regular season title again, get the 2 seed and romp through the playoffs putting the wood to Syracuse for the second time along the way.
Team "quit for a while". Good grief.
Offhand, we lost an all-time star in Kavanaugh, top-level scorers in Taylor & McLane, one of our most explosive players in Faison with his commitment to football, and a grit guy in Buchner. The current guys are certainly talented, but as Otter mentioned, we were a pretty young team elevated by Yago's experience (I think he himself mentioned he wanted to integrate with his teammates rather than be the Man on day one) that was realistically a year away, and a Final Four bid would have been a great goal in October. Personally, I think any of the first 4 mentioned may have given us enough firepower to help unlock that zone (& pretty sure Corrigan is already brainstorming this), but Princeton almost surely also lost some top talent of their own.
I hate losing too, but some days, the other team is just better. Princeton just had those vacuums on the GBs, where even something like a 41-35 split rather than 46-30 could have made a huge difference. I was irate after the PSU game as we were the better team and just seemed to have a brain freeze, but yesterday was one where I was texting a genuine congrats to my Princeton friends whom I had been chatting with all tournament.
Winning a championship, no matter the sport, is a helluva thing. Luck is ALWAYS involved. No, your point is not perfect that it was a toss-up - Princeton was favored by a goal and a half. But let's say it was a toss-up, which I can concede, because we were good this season.
Well, that means either team can grab some momentum and run with it. It happens. And that is precisely what Princeton did.
Would we have beaten Richmond had we not broken out to an 8-0 lead? Maybe not.
We beat the #1 team in the nation back-to-back. We had a good season.
But UVA showed a roadmap to how to beat us that Princeton might have paid attention to. We were not a perfect team this season. Would we have won yesterday had Jordan Faison returned to lax this season? Who knows. Again championships require some luck. There is no such thing as a sure thing.
What I loved about this season is that it was better than our attempt to 3-peat. Losing to a Penn State team that we should have beaten was painful. THAT, my friend, sucked ass! We had a bad turn yesterday, a terrible 2nd quarter, that pretty much derailed us completely. But we did basically the same thing to Cuse, whuppin them 6-0 in the 4th quarter to get to the final. It happens, and it happens in both directions.
So I think that is why you see a pretty tame reaction to our results yesterday. We didn't show up like Kelly's Bama shitshow. I am pissed about that to this day. We were 100% better than that. Yesterday was a day of possibility that just didn't materialize.
Still quite the casual fan with novice level understanding of the game, but I love this team and program. Painful to fall after the early lead then made more difficult sitting in the section adjacent to the full game standing Princeton students and parents.
Much thanks to Radi-skull for his insight about the team and sport and sharing the 2-hour ride to and from Charlottesville.
Hopefully next year we can take a trip to Philly on Memorial day weekend
I think it's also important to consider the paths for men's lacrosse versus football since the last time football won a national championship.
In 1988/89 when Corrigan arrived men's lacrosse had only been a varsity program for 7 years. In those days the tournament was 12 teams with one automatic "western" (meaning west of the Appalachians) qualifier. With apologies to the folks on this board that played on those teams, the lax world viewed the western qualifier as a charity case. MSU, Air Force, and ND traded births in those early days, before Corrigan's program building started to change that.
In 1995, ND finally broke through in the tourney, beating Duke in the first round, and was a pipe shot away from a tie game late in fourth in the quarters.
In 2001, ND got to its first Final Four, ultimately losing to Syracuse.
In 2010, the Irish got to their first championship game.
All during that time, the sport was growing at the high school level all over, in no small part because of Kevin Corrigan's efforts. He took-- and continues to take-- the team all over--- Florida, Texas, California, Georgia-- to play games. And those efforts were coupled with a willingness to recruit anywhere. And look at the dividends:
Since 2001, ND has been to 8 Final Fours, 5 title games and won two titles. We've missed the NCAA tournament once since 2006, and that was because of a royal screwing. Since 2006, we've made the quarterfinals 15 times. After rough starts, we now have .500 or better all-time records against Syracuse, Hopkins, Maryland, North Carolina and Duke, some of the bluestbloods in the sport.
That rise has been coupled by an explosion of talent in the sport. There are players at D3 programs now who might have started at Michigan State in the 1990s if there was a similar level of high school talent back then. That may be an exaggeration but only a slight one. So in short, we're doing this against a much deeper talent pool than Syracuse or Princeton faced in the 80s and 90s.
If our football or basketball programs had enjoyed that kind of sustained success, Rock's House or The Pit might feel a little calmer too.
This game has come so far. My boys played more lacrosse by the time they got to middle school than I did by the time I got to college. That is not an exaggeration.
The skill level is so much higher now, it's not the same game. RIT and Tufts could beat a bunch of D1 teams right now. Probably most of them.
I said this team's ceiling was playing on Memorial Day, and its floor was missing the tournament. The team played on Memorial Day. It played to its ceiling.
The program is in a great place. Yesterday stings, but I'm not going to get too bent out of shape. This program has gone from being an afterthought in the lacrosse world to being thought of as the standard in the sport, to borrow words from Quint Kessenich. A title game loss hurts, but it does not change that. And Kevin Corrigan, whose name should go on the field at Arlotta Stadium when he finally retires, got us to 3 title games in 4 years. I'm not going to rant about not adjusting to a zone fast enough.
I don’t know what the final count was but Princeton’s FOGO dominated ours when the game was still competitive. It is such a huge advantage to have possession off the face off. Princeton could attack attack attack the whole second quarter, then run clock with the lead in the second half.
To your point about things being tame on the board today, I can’t speak for others but I am not as invested in the lacrosse program - or any other non-professional program or pro franchise - compared to the ND football program. I love lacrosse and hope the Irish win, but it is more of a fun distraction. I don’t plan months in advance around the lacrosse schedule, for example.
Also, I agree with the comment below that when you win a recent title or two, the pressure comes off a little and you can just enjoy the moment a little more. A friend of mine is a Royals fan and he always says the 2015 WS championship has placated him until at least the 2030s. I imagine when the Irish finally win a national championship in football we will all exhale and have more fun with ND football than we do right now. (I could be wrong, of course.)
,,,,one team won 17 of 24 FOs and one team won the game by ten goals. Guess which was which?
The inability to break Princeton's Zone Defense. We won the Face-Off battle during the 2nd Qtr and overall it was 16-14 in Princeton's favor. If you watched the game and felt it came down to face-offs then I'm not sure if you're watching the same game. Lots of stuff happens after the face-off. It's one data point in the overall story.
We lost the game for 2 reasons:
1. Princeton beat us on ground balls 46-30. That's 16 more possessions. That led to 12 more shots. Both goalies played phenomenal. You do the math. We will lose every time. Corrigan's teams are supposed to win that battle. From the time you pick up a stick in 2nd grade well-coached teams do ground ball drills. It's like a nutcracker in football. It separates the lax bros from the serious players.
We were losing the GB battle 18-3 after the 1st quarter. That was terrifying. The plane was still flying but we were about to go down unless we massively course corrected. You can tell when Corrigan was interviewed that that stat was crushing him. ND has good kids. They were trying hard. They wanted it. Princeton also has good kids. One of their star players beat cancer. Their goalie's dad has ALS and hasn't been to a game in 8 years. I met Kabiri at a camp last year and he was one of the most humble young men I've met. They wanted it more. It sucked to watch but it happens. I'm not sure what Carlos Huerta wants the Board to do.
2. Our shots were poor because we couldn't break the zone. Offensive mindsets require rhythm and timing. We had none yesterday. Two of the Princeton kids went to the same high school. They could read each other's mind.
I love the team but our best teams have had offenses around guys that know each other well and have spent years developing timing, e.g Kavanaughs. It's like a QB-Receivers.
Our offense stalled at times this year becasue that rhythm was off. This wasn't 2024. This year's team may be more talented but lacrosse offense requires timing and rhythm. Princeton capitalized on that weakness and for one horrific 20-minute span it was catastrophic.
Those kids don't owe us anything. They came to play and it sucks it didn't work out. I'm 100% positive they are more upset the loss than Carlos Huerta.
Thank you.
Agree with this. They went after the groudballs harder and their offense had a sixth sense.
Good story about Palumbo btw
makes a big difference. For much of the season, and today, Princeton was the better team; our mistakes/some bad luck affected the margin, but I don't think anyone who followed lacrosse this season is shocked that we lost.
In football
There was a big question mark on this team coming into this year. Most of the knowledgeable posters on this board felt that we should probably make the NCAA tournament, but nobody was talking about winning a championship. As a matter of fact, if you went back in time on this board. You would see that once we lost to Virginia, and that was a big loss, there was serious discussion as to whether we would make the tournament at all.
We have the best Coach in the country right now. Am I gonna judge him on one bad day against the best team in the country? This is our third visit to the title game in four years. For one quarter today, we played undisciplined and sloppy. We took two huge penalties that we didn’t need to take, and Princeton made us pay. We actually won the other three quarters if you put them together.
We typically don’t play well on grass and we got wet grass in addition to grass. I thought it would be a factor this weekend and luckily Syracuse is a dome team so they probably had more trouble with the grass than we did.
The Princeton goalie went bananas this weekend. My son and I both saw him balling out against Duke and got concerned. If you’ve ever been a fan of hockey, you know that a hot goalie is the greatest equalizer. It’s the same in lacrosse.
If we played Princeton seven times I am strongly inclined to believe that we would win at least three, if not four of those games. But everything went wrong for us today.
Your post would be more appropriate for a situation like when Brian Kelly got blown out against Alabama in 2012. The big difference is that we love Kevin Corrigan and Brian Kelly is an asshole. The Notre Dame football team also hadn’t won the title in 2009 and 2010.
The Notre Dame lacrosse team is my escape from the reality of being Notre Dame football fan. The lacrosse team wins the big games at least their share of the big games. Perhaps you were not aware, but this team beat the number one team in the country two weeks in a row this season. The team has been tough and plays with class. If it was our habit to get blown out in the big game, I would not be giving this amount of slack. But right now I’m not sure that any program in the country would trade their last five years or their near future for ours. Sometimes you just have to give the other guy his due.
I became frustrated watching the game as it became apparent by about the middle of the 3rd quarter that we likely wouldn't be able to make it a game. My frustration quickly ended knowing how dominant our program has been in the past few years. Had we not fallen asleep against PSU last year, we would have been in the final 4 for 4 straight years. I don't know how anyone can't be happy about where the program is at. Sometimes the other team just has a phenomenal day. That was Princeton yesterday.
Your updates and analysis are highly valuable.
Today sucked, but I loved watching this team develop. Onward.