We know Notre Dame is going to look completely different in 2023-24. The few returnees have made minimal impact on the program so far, and it’s one reason why Jon Rothstein of CBS Sports has picked the Irish to finish last in the ACC. Rothstein has indirectly taken that reasoning a step further by listing the percentage of returning scoring for each conference program. You’ll see that the Irish aren’t even in the same hemisphere of anyone else:
ACC returning scoring by percentage:
Duke 81%
Clemson 62.5%
Miami 59.7%
Georgia Tech 59.4%
Boston College 59.3%
Florida State 57.3%
Virginia Tech 55.1%
Syracuse 54.4%
Wake Forest 53.8%
North Carolina 45.4%
NC State 41%
Pitt 39.4%
Louisville 37.8%
Virginia 28.8%
Notre Dame 1.5%— Jon Rothstein (@JonRothstein) July 11, 2023
The only inaccuracy with this is that it actually goes up to 1.6% if you round it up to the nearest decimal, so for our purposes, we’re going with 1.57%. Nitpicking aside, if you take [autotag]Matt Zona[/autotag]’s 34 points and [autotag]Alex Wade[/autotag]’s single free throw and divide them by the 2,227 points the Irish scored during the season, the math checks out. [autotag]Tony Sanders Jr.[/autotag] was scoreless in five games, and [autotag]J.R. Konieczny[/autotag] didn’t play at all.
While none of this technically means anything for the upcoming season, it does illustrate how it might take even the most diehard Irish fans some time to get to know this new team. No one is projected to make a big splash right away either. Time for some of the new guys to prove those projections wrong.
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