After a championship week that went anything but smoothly for Notre Dame, all of South Bend can take a collective exhale. For the first time since 2017, the Irish have qualified for the NCAA Tournament after being placed in the West Regional. They will take on Rutgers in a battle of No. 11 seeds as part of the First Four in Dayton, Ohio. The winner of this game will play sixth-seeded Alabama in the first round.
The Irish have an all-time record of 20-13 against the Scarlet Knights. The former Big East rivals last faced each other in the second round of the 2013 conference tournament. The Irish won that game, 69-61. In fact, nine of the past 11 meetings have gone their way.
It was fitting that these programs met in the 2013 Big East Tournament because both programs left that conference after that season. Now, they get to face each other in an unofficial ACC-Big Ten Challenge with much bigger stakes than conference pride. Getting into the Round of 64 by playing an extra game may not have been a goal either program wanted to achieve, but that’s just how it goes sometimes. Still, they likely will be thinking less about that than being one of 68 teams who still can win it all.
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