Hey, guess what?
It’s time to start talking basketball. Well, it’s never NOT been time to talk about basketball, because that time is all the time for me. But we are getting closer to the basketball season,
and I’ve already started prepping for the SEC Conference Previews. That means it’s also time to look at the non-conference schedule.
The Full Non-Conference Schedule:
- October 24th — vs. Kansas State (exhibition)
- November 3rd — at Howard Bison | Preview
- November 7th — vs. Southeast Missouri | Preview
- November 9th — vs VMI | Preview
- November 12th — vs Minnesota | Preview
- November 17th — vs Prairie View A&M | Preview
- November 20th — vs South Dakota | Preview
- November 25th — vs South Carolina State | Preview
- November 28th — vs Cleveland State | Preview
- December 2nd — at Notre Dame
- December 7th — vs Kansas (in Kansas City, MO)
- December 11th — vs Alabama State
- December 14th — vs Bethune-Cookman
- December 22nd — vs Illinois (in St. Louis, MO)
These previews aren’t here to re-hash the argument over whether Dennis Gates put together a good schedule or not. It’s simply to talk about the opponents, and what can be expected. We’re also not going to use these to preview Kansas State since it’s an exhibition. We’ll do a quick K-State preview before the game, but for now we’re going to focus on the games that matter.
Let’s Meet: Notre Dame Fighting Irish
When most of the programs we feature here are obscure directional colleges, there’s an important part of figuring out exactly where it is and what’s going on there. But with Notre Dame it’s a little different. Maybe it’s just being raised in St. Louis around a lot… and I mean A LOT… of Catholics, but I feel like Missouri might be the only school in the country I know more about as an institution. And I’ve never been a Notre Dame fan.
Where’s the school? South Bend, of course, didn’t you see Rudy?
The athletics have been born around the Irish Football team, which has claimed 11 national championships and is one of the most iconic sports brands in the world. Sure things have fallen back a bit in recent years, but it’s still one of the top 5 or 10 programs in the country. The women’s basketball team has multiple national championships also.
The Irish have been ACC members (except for Football) since 2013, prior to that they were in the Big East, and before that they were an Independent. Being an independing for most of their 121 seasons led to some wild seasons. Like their 33-7 season in 1909, when most teams were playing like 12 games the Irish were racking up 40 games. They were really very good through the 30s and 40s, the 50s were up and down, the same with the 60s, and then Digger Phelps got hired in the early 70s and he went on a great run of tournament appearances from 1974 to 1981, then again from 1985 to 1990. Mike Brey reignited the brand in 2001 and went to 13 NCAAs , his last one being as an 11 seed in 2022. But even the last 8 seasons only include that one appearance, things have gotten rocky.
Head Coach | Micah Shrewsberry | 3rd Season 28-38
If I ever misspell his last name forgive me there’s a Shrewsbury, Missouri which borders where I grew up in St. Louis County. But Micah Shrewsberry has an interesting history as a coach, you may not remember but his name was mentioned by Jeff Goodman as a potential hire at Missouri when Kim Anderson was looking at getting fired after his third season. At the time Shrewsberry was an assistant at Purdue after spending 6 seasons as an assistant for the Boston Celtics. Prior to that he was under Matt Painter again at Purdue, and Brad Stevens at Butler. So you can see the lineage of Painter and Stevens is a nice looking resume point.
He got the job at Penn State and immdiately overachieved by taking the program to their first NCAA tournament since 2011, in just his second season. It was just the 10th appearance in school history (and five of those were before 1965.
Things have been shakier at Notre Dame. However the program had been trending down prior to his taking over, and this is all timed with an era where NIL and revenue sharing has taken on such a bigger piece of the puzzle when it comes to roster construction.
Series History | Missouri leads 7-2
You might be surprised to see that Mizzou and Notre Dame have played that many times, since there aren’t many of them in recent memory. The picture above is from 2011, when Frank Haith’s Tiger squad torched what turned out to be a pretty good Notre Dame team. But Missouri dismantled the Irish, beating them by 29 points. Marcus Denmon dropped 26 points, Phil Pressey added 17, and Ricardo Ratliffe and Kim English chipped in 12 and 10 points each. What’s even more fun is Missouri only shot 11 threes and made 5, they were just that good offensively that day.
Prior to that game, there was a 6 game series from 1990 to 1995, Mizzou went 4-2 in those games. They lost by 31 points in the first game at Notre Dame in March of 1990. I guess it was weird for Mizzou to spend months battling Big 8 foes and then head off to South Bend to finish the season, especially considering that season the Irish finished 16-13, and Missouri was 26-6, but that game was the harbinger to a sour end to the season as the Tigers lost next to Colorado in the Big 8 tournament and then to Northern Iowa in the NCAA Tournament.
The Tigers paid them back the next season beating Notre Dame 84-54 in Columbia in a year with a post-season ban. Sheesh the early 90s were a wild time.
What about the team now?
I think you could call Notre Dame one of the least active transfer portal teams this past offseason. That’s not an official record but the Irish had only two players enter, and plucked just one player out of the portal. That’s got to be some sort of record these days.
Their big new addition comes by way of Northern Arizona, a 10 point and 8 rebound forward named Carson Towt who has one more year to play. Tae Davis transferred out after averaging 15 points last year, and JR Konieczny moved on to FGCU after averaging just 4.3 points per game.
Back is junior point guard Markus Burton, a 20 ppg scorer at lead guard. Burton improved his three point shooting last season from 30% to 37.5%, and surprisingly enough his efficiency improved from 97.6 to 107.4. Burton will be stirring the drink again this year, the hope is the supporting cast is a little better and more consistent.
Shrewsberry has put together back to back quality recruiting classes, headlined by 5-star wing Jalen Haralson, a top 20 in state talent this past season. Haralson is a winning player so he should factor in early. They’re also hoping for a big jump in year 2 from top 50 wing Sir Mohammed. The development of the younger players is where this programs success hinges, Cole Certa and Garrett Sundra were also highly rated freshmen last year and each saw limited action.
The Irish are currently the 66th ranked team in BartTorkvik.com’s preseason rankings, which means a trip to South Bend in early December could prove tricky. Shrewberry’s team should be improved over last year, so the Tigers will need to be ready.
