For much of the first quarter of its Thursday night game, there seemed to be little difference between Boston College women’s basketball and the No. 3 Fighting Irish.
Coming out of the gate, just 18 seconds into the matchup, Kaylah Ivey nailed a 3-pointer from downtown, igniting BC’s offense with the first points on the board.
Five minutes later, T’yana Todd, who went on to score a team-leading 18 points in the game, delivered a clutch jumper for the Eagles, bringing the score to a 13–12 BC lead.
After earning 10 rebounds and maintaining an 18–17 lead over the Irish at the conclusion of the first frame, the Eagles were on pace for a possible upset.
But BC’s hopes of an upset collapsed quite quickly in the last few minutes of the second quarter. The Eagles were ultimately unable to put the pieces together, as Notre Dame (17–2, 8–0 Atlantic Coast) cruised by BC (12–9, 3–5) with a 89–63 win.
“I thought in the first quarter, we almost just traded baskets with them, but we were making shots,” BC head coach Joanna Bernabei-McNamee said. “We were finishing around the basket. I just think the difference between that, even the first half, minus three minutes of the first half, we made shots. In the second half, we seemed like we couldn’t find the bottom of the net. I then think we started mentally pressing, like, ‘Man, we gotta make this. We got to do something.’ And I think when you start playing basketball like that, it’s never going to look good, and it’s never going to really be in your favor.”
After Notre Dame snuck to a 19–18 lead over BC off a Maddy Westbeld layup 23 seconds into the second frame, the Fighting Irish took the reins and never looked back.
A Todd 3-pointer managed to get the Eagles within one point under a minute later, but that was not enough to stop the bleeding.
Despite entering the second frame with a one-point lead, the Eagles went into halftime down 10.
“We have to say, ‘This is what we want to see for 40 minutes,’ and we’ve got to figure out a way to do that, no matter what’s happening on the offensive end,” Bernabei-McNamee said. “Our transition defense cannot have layups. We can’t give that many offensive boards to anybody.”
The 10-point differential between the Eagles and Notre Dame only increased as the second half progressed.
While BC’s largest lead of the game was just three points, the Fighting Irish managed to carve out a 20-point lead by the end of the third frame as they capitalized on BC’s inability to sink shots.
What most clearly limited BC’s chances of competing with the Fighting Irish was its inability to make anything happen at the 3-point line. Shooting 7 of 18 from the 3-point line, Notre Dame’s numbers starkly contrasted BC’s 4 of 20 from downtown.
Boasting 52 points in the paint compared to BC’s 24 points in the paint, Notre Dame played to their strengths, utilizing every offensive weapon they have.
“I can’t think of a player on Notre Dame’s team that isn’t really good, from one to the eight players that they play a lot, there really isn’t a weak point,” Bernabei-McNamee said. “And that’s why we had to be much more in our A-game, like we were in the first part of the game.”
Hannah Hidalgo, Olivia Miles, and Maddy Westbeld all scored double-digits, combining for 53 points of Notre Dame’s total points.
“It wasn’t so much that the No. 3 team in the country took it from us, which they did, it’s more so that we also took it from ourselves by not controlling the controllable,” Bernabei-McNamee said. “We’ve got to control all the things that we can control.”
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