The No. 3 Notre Dame Fighting Irish are headed to their first Elite Eight since 1979. Demetrius Jackson's 20 points and Jerian Grant's 11 assists led Notre Dame's offense to a 81-70 win over the No. 7 Wichita State Shockers on Thursday in the Midwest Region.
The Fighting Irish stunned Wichita State early, holding the Shockers to five points in the game's first six minutes, at which point Notre Dame lead, 18-5. But Notre Dame's lead would never grow any larger than 13 points in the first half, and Wichita State started chipping away. The Shockers looked much more like the team that many believed deserved better than a No. 7 seed.
Wichita State even took its first lead at 38-37 with 16:41 to play on a Darius Carter jumper, but Notre Dame answered. It answered loud. Jackson made back-to-back threes, and Pat Connaughton added another a few possessions later. Before the Shockers knew it, they were down, 50-42. It didn't stop there. Notre Dame made 17 of its first 22 shots in the second half.
Notre Dame kept growing its lead, and when things like this started happening, the writing was on the wall.
A year after entering the NCAA Tournament undefeated and then falling in the round of 32 to eventual national runner-up Kentucky, Wichita State fell one game short of a potential rematch with the Wildcats.
★★★
3 things we learned
1. Notre Dame can run without Jerian Grant out front. To date, much of the electricity of the Fighting Irish's offense has been (rightfully) attributed to Grant's scoring. But with Wichita keyed in on him Thursday -- and with Jackson and Connaughton feeling hot-handed -- Grant didn't need to score to spark Notre Dame's offense. He finished with 11 assists, one of which was on the damn-near-deadly alley-oop pictured above. He took what the defense gave him, which was anything but the basket. If Kentucky advances as expected to play Notre Dame in the Elite Eight, Mike Brey should be comforted that his team flourished offensively when its best scorer was kept to eight field goal attempts against an elite defense.
2. Notre Dame has as good a shot of beating Kentucky as anyone. Heck, West Virginia has a shot later Thursday night (and it may have already done so, or lost by 20, by the time you read this). As efficient as Notre Dame is on offense and as hot it can get from behind the three-point line, the Fighting Irish have the ability and the experience against big-time opponents to pull it off. They topped both Duke and North Carolina twice this season and have now been where no Notre Dame team has ever been under Mike Brey: the Elite Eight. If the Fighting Irish can keep Kentucky from scoring is another issue, but no team will match up perfectly with the Wildcats.
3. This probably wasn't Gregg Marshall's final game as coach of Wichita State. The Shockers' coach is a popular man among coaching searches -- or at least public record of coaching searches -- and it's now rumored that the Alabama Crimson Tide are going to try to drag him away to Tuscaloosa with a limitless pile of money and Nick Saban working to recruit him. Gary Parrish of CBS Sports profiled Marshall before the NCAA Tournament, and given the information in Parrish's story, it seems unlikely Marshall would leave just so that he could swim upstream against John Calipari in the SEC every year. But you never know. He could take the Alabama job after all, or he could end up somewhere else. But until the perfect gig comes along, Marshall seems more than happy to stay where he is and compete with a Wichita State team that returns both Fred Van Vleet and Ron Baker next season.