By PAUL GOTHAM
BUFFALO, N.Y. — One year you’re a late-season insertion into the starting lineup. Next you’re being compared to one of the game’s greats. Such is life for the University of Notre Dame’s Matt Farrell.
The 6-foot-1 junior point guard who stepped into the starting five during last year’s Atlantic Coast Conference tournament has Notre Dame ready for another run in the NCAA Tournament.
“It’s an exciting time,” Farrell said. “We need to enjoy it.”
Farrell scores more than 14 points a game and hands out nearly six assists in 34 minutes of play. A far cry from the less than 10 minutes per game during ACC conference play last season including seven DNPs.
“When I was put into the lineup last year it was obviously fun and exciting for me,” Farrell added. “It was more of a sense to get out there and play. It was a chance to play. It’s a chance to play with the guys who I had practice with all year. I think it’s the same way this year. I’m playing with the same confidence.”
Farrell’s efforts drew the praise of head coach Mike Brey who compared his point guard from Bridgewater, N.J. to another New Jersey native and the NCAA’s all-time leader in assists, Bobby Hurley, whom Brey coached while as an assistant at Duke University.
“The demeanor and the edge are the same,” Brey said of the two players. “It’s that I-95, New Jersey edge that both of them have.”
And when it comes to evaluation?
“I think he’s better than Hurley because he shoots it better,” Brey said of Farrell. “He shoots it better than Hurley.”
Notre Dame has made two straight runs to the Elite Eight. The No. 5-seed Fighting Irish (25-9) open the 2017 NCAA Tournament against No. 12-seed Princeton (23-6). The Tigers are led Ivy League Player of the Year Spencer Weisz (10.6 ppg) and Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year Myles Stephens (12.6).
First-team All-Ivy League performer Steven Cook scores 13.7 points per game. Devin Canady averaged 13.7 points and connected on 79 3-pointers for a team which averages more than 26 long-range attempts per game.
“One thing I said to our guys right after the selection show, I said, ‘it’s like guarding ourselves every day,'” Brey noted. “They’ve gotten away from just the pure Princeton offense. They’re flowing a little bit more, which is how we played at Notre Dame. They still have Princeton tendencies, but they are a little more — they are not married to the predictable movement every time down.
“They still cut. They still really go without it in back-cut. I think the tendencies are all there, that’s drilled into you in the Princeton stuff, and these kids ran pure Princeton as young guys…That structure every possession, and open the floor up a little bit and play, and, you know, that’s kind of how we built our program. If you recruit high basketball IQ guys, you can give them some freedom to play.
“They kinda slow you down,” Farrell said. “We’re going to have less possessions. They run the shot clock down to single digits with that continuous motion. We just got to stay true to what we do. We got to stay true to our defensive assignments. We’re going to have less shots on the other end, so we have to take good shots every time down the floor.”
Notre Dame and Princeton tip off at 12:15 pm.
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