Photo by: John Quackenbos
It Might've Been An Upset, But BC Not Surprised By Success
January 21, 2022 | Women's Basketball, #ForBoston Files
The Eagles shocked the world but never shocked themselves by beating Notre Dame (again).
With less than three minutes remaining in the third quarter on Thursday night, Notre Dame's Dara Mabrey fed Maya Dodson for a layup that extended the Fighting Irish's lead to 14 points. They led, 55-41, and at that moment, ESPN's win probability extended to 95.6%. Boston College had been scoreless for over three minutes, and Bernabei-McNamee needed a timeout to settle her team.
Cameron Swartz immediately hit a three-pointer, and from that point onward, the Eagles hit the gas pedal. They outscored the Irish, 32-16, over the final 12:53 and shocked the No. 17-ranked team in the nation with a 73-71 win.
"I think we get better in every game," head coach Joanna Bernabei-McNamee said. "We grow, and that's why I love coaching this team. They reach off each other and feed off each other, and at the end of the day, the most important thing is that they believe in each other. Even the players, the younger players that are on the bench that don't get a lot of playing time, believe in the players that are playing. There isn't any animosity or a weird friction that so many college teams have. If we can keep that going throughout this year, everyone is ready, and it just makes winning so much fun."
Beating Notre Dame felt very differently this year than it did in the past, and while it's billed as an upset, it didn't necessarily feel like the better team lost to an inferior opponent. BC opened the game on an 8-0 run before the Irish stormed back with its own 11-0 run to put the Eagles into a deficit that stretched to five points before the end of the quarter. That duel extended to eight before the half and was as high as 14 after BC's shot missed to start the second half.
The Eagles needed to adapt, and they found their stroke by feeding both Swartz, who hit the aforementioned shot, and Makayla Dickens. They scored a combined 18 points in the third quarter to go with Swartz's 13-point first half and helped claw BC back to within a point after Dickens beat the buzzer with a fast break layup.
"One thing our team has always been about is feeding the hot hand," Swartz said. "It wasn't just my hot hand [on Thursday], which helped a lot. It was Dickie (Makayla Dickens) hitting a three to get us turned around. She would hit something, then I would hit something, and we were a really big tag team. There was one time where Dickie would shoot a three and I knew not to crash because I knew it was going in."
It led to a fourth quarter battle for the college basketball annals, a back-and-forth see-saw that required the entire team's effort at both ends of the floor. Dickens scored nine by going 3-for-4 on trifectas, and Swartz added five points by hitting her only three-point attempt. Maria Gakdeng started the quarter with a field goal, and both Taylor Soule and Marnelle Garraud grabbed multiple rebounds as the former had her first double-double of the season.
"T-Soule has that thing inside of her," Bernabei-McNamee said. "She has this 'refuse-to-lose' mentality, and she was a monster on the offensive boards. If we were going to miss, you could almost feel, especially in that second half when we were down, that T-Soule was going to clean it up, and then she played with more poise where she stayed under control. She didn't try to do too much, but then defensively, she played like a maniac. They were trying to set on-ball screens, and her player couldn't use them because [Soule] was just moving her feet and keeping her hands out and playing really solid defense."
Having those contributions pushed BC past Notre Dame for the third consecutive game at Conte Forum and furthered the notion that the Eagles now compete as equals among those blue-blooded programs. They can beat them in any given game, and though it's considered an upset, the context reveals more about the character of the Boston College program than it does about anything else.
BC's win over Notre Dame two years ago, for example, also ended with a last second thriller when forward Georgia Pineau fed a perfect floater pass to Emma Guy, who laid a shot through her hoop to win as time expired. Conte Forum exploded in the aftermath and dawned a new day in women's college basketball after the Eagles swept the Irish for the first time in program history.
Much was made about that, but the context has since been lost over the past year-plus. Notre Dame was the same program that advanced to the Final Four in 2018 and 2019 when it played BC twice during the 2019-2020 season. It had two consecutive national championship game appearances and won its first title in 2018 by infamously beating UConn at the overtime buzzer before beating Mississippi State by three. The Irish lost to Baylor the next year, but the uniforms, the logo, the fight song, the mascot, the home arena, and the legendary coach - Muffet McGraw - were the same when they played their home-and-home against the Eagles.
They were not, though, the same team. The Notre Dame from the Final Four sent five players into the first two rounds of the WNBA Draft that offseason, and the 2019-2020 team looked entirely different from its national championship incarnation. It was under .500 and would have missed the NCAA Tournament after losing to Pittsburgh in the first round of the ACC Tournament for the first time, but COVID-19 intervened and canceled the postseason altogether.
It was obvious the Irish were never going to stay down, not with their pedigree, and this year marked an early resurgence after new head coach Niele Ivey rebuilt the team to .500 last season. Notre Dame did finally and officially miss a postseason after it finished sixth in the ACC last year, but the voters seemed to cast that aside when the team opened up with a steaming-hot 13 wins to start the first half-plus of this season.
BC, meanwhile, couldn't sustain the momentum from the 2019-2020 season after it missed the tournament during the COVID surge. It dipped last season, which Bernabei-McNamee admittedly deemed a "debacle" in her preseason press conference, but it was enough for voters to avoid the Eagles after the early season losses to Boston University and VCU. They knocked on the door of the top-25 until they lost to North Carolina, and the losses to Louisville and NC State, albeit against teams ranked inside the top-5, seemed to reinforce the notion that BC was nothing more than a bubble team.
That all changed on Thursday when the Eagles rallied past Notre Dame for their first win over a ranked opponent in two years and their first home win since the 2014-2015 season. The voters believed in Notre Dame and didn't believe in BC, but there was nothing fluky about the way the Eagles won the game. They went out and took it from the Irish by shooting better when it mattered, defending harder and overall playing a game that saw them emerge victorious over their rivals for the third consecutive season at home.
"The key for us was just to stick with the game plan," Dickens said. "Our coaches have a really good game plan for us whenever we play certain teams, and even if we're up or down, we just remember our scout on defense and stay true to what we're good at on offense. We're going to go inside-out from the post, and if they don't have a shot, I'm shooting it. We're sharing the ball."
"We're really good at sharing the ball," Soule agreed. "Honestly, we didn't even know that we were down at 14 because we didn't ever play like it, and that's a key characteristic of this team. No matter what we're down, the game is never over. Even when we had a turnover with four seconds left, the game wasn't over, and we still had to get a stop as a team. It wasn't one person; it was every single one of us fighting until the buzzer sounded."
BC and Notre Dame will meet again this season in South Bend, a game that will surely amount to a slobberknocker of a matchup. Until then, it's onto the next for the Eagles, who celebrated last night but awoke on Friday to a film session and a preparation for Miami, their next opponent, on Sunday.
"I'm really proud of them," Bernabei-McNamee said, "but this can't be the biggest win. This is what we build on. That's a goal for us as a program. Yes, we're going to get hyped and celebrate every single win. But we're not celebrating like it's our championship. This was a win, and now we have to go prepare because Miami is coming here on Sunday. We've got to be ready because they're a very good team."
BC and Miami will tip off on Sunday at 12 p.m. from Conte Forum in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. The game can be seen on the ACC's Regional Sports Network coverage, locally in Boston on NESN.
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Cameron Swartz immediately hit a three-pointer, and from that point onward, the Eagles hit the gas pedal. They outscored the Irish, 32-16, over the final 12:53 and shocked the No. 17-ranked team in the nation with a 73-71 win.
"I think we get better in every game," head coach Joanna Bernabei-McNamee said. "We grow, and that's why I love coaching this team. They reach off each other and feed off each other, and at the end of the day, the most important thing is that they believe in each other. Even the players, the younger players that are on the bench that don't get a lot of playing time, believe in the players that are playing. There isn't any animosity or a weird friction that so many college teams have. If we can keep that going throughout this year, everyone is ready, and it just makes winning so much fun."
Beating Notre Dame felt very differently this year than it did in the past, and while it's billed as an upset, it didn't necessarily feel like the better team lost to an inferior opponent. BC opened the game on an 8-0 run before the Irish stormed back with its own 11-0 run to put the Eagles into a deficit that stretched to five points before the end of the quarter. That duel extended to eight before the half and was as high as 14 after BC's shot missed to start the second half.
The Eagles needed to adapt, and they found their stroke by feeding both Swartz, who hit the aforementioned shot, and Makayla Dickens. They scored a combined 18 points in the third quarter to go with Swartz's 13-point first half and helped claw BC back to within a point after Dickens beat the buzzer with a fast break layup.
"One thing our team has always been about is feeding the hot hand," Swartz said. "It wasn't just my hot hand [on Thursday], which helped a lot. It was Dickie (Makayla Dickens) hitting a three to get us turned around. She would hit something, then I would hit something, and we were a really big tag team. There was one time where Dickie would shoot a three and I knew not to crash because I knew it was going in."
It led to a fourth quarter battle for the college basketball annals, a back-and-forth see-saw that required the entire team's effort at both ends of the floor. Dickens scored nine by going 3-for-4 on trifectas, and Swartz added five points by hitting her only three-point attempt. Maria Gakdeng started the quarter with a field goal, and both Taylor Soule and Marnelle Garraud grabbed multiple rebounds as the former had her first double-double of the season.
"T-Soule has that thing inside of her," Bernabei-McNamee said. "She has this 'refuse-to-lose' mentality, and she was a monster on the offensive boards. If we were going to miss, you could almost feel, especially in that second half when we were down, that T-Soule was going to clean it up, and then she played with more poise where she stayed under control. She didn't try to do too much, but then defensively, she played like a maniac. They were trying to set on-ball screens, and her player couldn't use them because [Soule] was just moving her feet and keeping her hands out and playing really solid defense."
Having those contributions pushed BC past Notre Dame for the third consecutive game at Conte Forum and furthered the notion that the Eagles now compete as equals among those blue-blooded programs. They can beat them in any given game, and though it's considered an upset, the context reveals more about the character of the Boston College program than it does about anything else.
BC's win over Notre Dame two years ago, for example, also ended with a last second thriller when forward Georgia Pineau fed a perfect floater pass to Emma Guy, who laid a shot through her hoop to win as time expired. Conte Forum exploded in the aftermath and dawned a new day in women's college basketball after the Eagles swept the Irish for the first time in program history.
Much was made about that, but the context has since been lost over the past year-plus. Notre Dame was the same program that advanced to the Final Four in 2018 and 2019 when it played BC twice during the 2019-2020 season. It had two consecutive national championship game appearances and won its first title in 2018 by infamously beating UConn at the overtime buzzer before beating Mississippi State by three. The Irish lost to Baylor the next year, but the uniforms, the logo, the fight song, the mascot, the home arena, and the legendary coach - Muffet McGraw - were the same when they played their home-and-home against the Eagles.
They were not, though, the same team. The Notre Dame from the Final Four sent five players into the first two rounds of the WNBA Draft that offseason, and the 2019-2020 team looked entirely different from its national championship incarnation. It was under .500 and would have missed the NCAA Tournament after losing to Pittsburgh in the first round of the ACC Tournament for the first time, but COVID-19 intervened and canceled the postseason altogether.
It was obvious the Irish were never going to stay down, not with their pedigree, and this year marked an early resurgence after new head coach Niele Ivey rebuilt the team to .500 last season. Notre Dame did finally and officially miss a postseason after it finished sixth in the ACC last year, but the voters seemed to cast that aside when the team opened up with a steaming-hot 13 wins to start the first half-plus of this season.
BC, meanwhile, couldn't sustain the momentum from the 2019-2020 season after it missed the tournament during the COVID surge. It dipped last season, which Bernabei-McNamee admittedly deemed a "debacle" in her preseason press conference, but it was enough for voters to avoid the Eagles after the early season losses to Boston University and VCU. They knocked on the door of the top-25 until they lost to North Carolina, and the losses to Louisville and NC State, albeit against teams ranked inside the top-5, seemed to reinforce the notion that BC was nothing more than a bubble team.
That all changed on Thursday when the Eagles rallied past Notre Dame for their first win over a ranked opponent in two years and their first home win since the 2014-2015 season. The voters believed in Notre Dame and didn't believe in BC, but there was nothing fluky about the way the Eagles won the game. They went out and took it from the Irish by shooting better when it mattered, defending harder and overall playing a game that saw them emerge victorious over their rivals for the third consecutive season at home.
"The key for us was just to stick with the game plan," Dickens said. "Our coaches have a really good game plan for us whenever we play certain teams, and even if we're up or down, we just remember our scout on defense and stay true to what we're good at on offense. We're going to go inside-out from the post, and if they don't have a shot, I'm shooting it. We're sharing the ball."
"We're really good at sharing the ball," Soule agreed. "Honestly, we didn't even know that we were down at 14 because we didn't ever play like it, and that's a key characteristic of this team. No matter what we're down, the game is never over. Even when we had a turnover with four seconds left, the game wasn't over, and we still had to get a stop as a team. It wasn't one person; it was every single one of us fighting until the buzzer sounded."
BC and Notre Dame will meet again this season in South Bend, a game that will surely amount to a slobberknocker of a matchup. Until then, it's onto the next for the Eagles, who celebrated last night but awoke on Friday to a film session and a preparation for Miami, their next opponent, on Sunday.
"I'm really proud of them," Bernabei-McNamee said, "but this can't be the biggest win. This is what we build on. That's a goal for us as a program. Yes, we're going to get hyped and celebrate every single win. But we're not celebrating like it's our championship. This was a win, and now we have to go prepare because Miami is coming here on Sunday. We've got to be ready because they're a very good team."
BC and Miami will tip off on Sunday at 12 p.m. from Conte Forum in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. The game can be seen on the ACC's Regional Sports Network coverage, locally in Boston on NESN.
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Players Mentioned
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