Eagles Ready to Shake Down the Thunder

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. -- Somewhere in a parallel universe, the old Big East is still together. The warring factions battle through their tribalism by battering one another on a basketball court, and heated rivals rattle their sabers in neverending struggles to determine the superior brand. In that alternate dimension, the grainy footage of the bygone era is playing out nightly in a higher definition.

Boston College and Notre Dame weren't necessarily the greatest rivals in that other world, but the Fighting Irish's arrival in 1995 was a seamless transition within the founding fathers of the league like Providence, Villanova and Syracuse. Those wistful years were the primary casualty of the tectonic shift in college athletics, but the reunion in the Atlantic Coast Conference brought some of those Big East feels into Tobacco Road's blueblood league.

The Holy War on Hardwood is now an earnest rivalry, especially after BC's win at the Joyce Center last year, and the Eagles and Fighting Irish are tied to one another by their joint history. On Saturday, the original Big East production renews itself one more time when BC and Notre Dame meet up in South Bend.

"You lose some heartbreakers that you should have won," head coach Jim Christian said after Tuesday night's 84-62 drubbing of Miami. "You play against Virginia and you just can't make (a shot). To have the resiliency to come back and have the focus and put in the effort that we put in against (Miami), it's a huge step forward and just like everything else, you have to keep building on it."

On its surface level, BC and Notre Dame is a game between two teams staring at doppelgangers of one another. Both underproduced wins in two of the nation's most challenging non-conference schedules and early ACC returns have knocked them both into the lower tier of the conference. The last two games separate them, though, and offer a glimpse into a potential lockhorn matchup at Purcell Pavilion. Both lost to Virginia in some capacity, but BC roared past Miami in its last game while Notre Dame dropped a 14-point decision at Virginia Tech.

BC was helter-skelter in those two games and struggled to score against the Cavaliers before the explosion against the Hurricanes. The defense didn't play poorly but was eaten in different, more specific situations by a monster Cavalier frontcourt, and the offense more or less missed shots it should have been making. All of that course corrected, finally, against the Hurricanes when 18 three-pointers found the bottom of the cup.

"I think it's funny because I thought we had really improved our shooting coming into the year," Christian said. "We added Rich Kelly and Freddie Scott, who hasn't really played but is a really good three-point shooter that would have helped a lot. CJ is a much-improved 3-point shooter, and Jay (Heath) was going to be a sophomore. Wynston came back and he's a career 35-plus percentage shooter, and he is probably shooting about that right now.

"I thought we would be much improved," he reiterated. "I just think it's unexplainable in sports, and I thought we had great shots, as good as you can get against Virginia, and against Miami, they went in. Once you get a couple, it spreads."

That's a Jekyll-and-Hyde contrast to a notoriously-consistent Notre Dame offense averaging around 65 points per game against conference opponents. The Irish scored 57 points in their first game against Virginia but otherwise hovered right around the same number of offensive opportunities in their other four games. They scored 65 points against Duke and North Carolina before dipping to 63 against Virginia Tech. Their last offensive output went back up to 68, against Virginia in a second meeting, but there's a remarkable ability to hit a bar in South Bend.

That defines the intrigue around the rivalry's installation on Saturday. Boston College offered high-risk, high-reward performances earlier in the season and hit at least 70 points in six games with a seventh game - the URI win - at 69 points. The Eagles' ability to score often comes from its ability to stop teams defensively and push in transition, an element they displayed in earnest against the Hurricanes while tilting the outlier performance from the Virginia game.

The Fighting Irish, on the other hand, are a team built around getting what they can give. They punish teams with a balanced attack but haven't been able to find a fourth gear to push with an attacking offense. That puts more emphasis on BC and its ability to sustain the momentum generated from the Miami game and the ability of a seven-man rotation to limit turnovers, fouls and the assorted mistakes that cripple the transition game.

"A lot of our shots were inside-out threes," Christian said. "Those are the ones you have to make, and those are the ones that you have to make in this league. I never wavered on that even when we didn't shoot the ball great. We were still finding ways to score, but we've gotten better. Sometimes the results don't show it, but we've gotten better.

"Our defense has gotten better," he continued. "We have a better understanding of what we're doing. Guys are individually getting better, and we've played well. We played really well at Duke, and we played really well against Virginia even though we didn't shoot well. We just have to keep getting better, believing in ourselves, and it all comes back to their resilience."

BC and Notre Dame will tip off at 4 p.m. from the Joyce Center in South Bend, Indiana. The game can be seen on the ACC Network with radio broadcast available on the BC Learfield IMG College Sports Network, locally in Boston on WEEI 850 AM.

Players Mentioned

Rich Kelly

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