Mike Brey believes problem vs Marquette started on the offensive end

Following a 79-64 loss to Marquette on Sunday, Notre Dame coach Mike Brey expressed frustration with the performance from his offense. Although the defense certainly deserved its fair share of blame after allowing 79 points on 47.8% shooting, Brey also noticed several scoring opportunities the Fighting Irish missed.

Marquette absolutely dominated in the post, with 50 points in the paint compared to just 22 for Notre Dame. That was one specific area that Brey harped on in his postgame press conference, noting the poor effort on both ends.

“A lot of it wasn’t necessarily on our bigs, it was their guards driving,” he said. “You can only play the two-versus-three game so much. The first half it worked out pretty good, because they had 31 points and I’m like, ‘OK, these guys are scoring 80 or 90. We’ve got the tempo a little slower. They only made two 3s. OK, maybe we can get on an offensive run.’ But we just could never score.

“I know they scored 79, but I really look at our offense. If we can’t score more against this speed — and God, how many around the bucket did we not finish? Especially early. We get frazzled a little bit because of the athletic ability even though I thought we got into the lane. We had 13 assists, we got into the lane, we kicked. When you get in there, you’re gonna have to make ’em pay more. I don’t think we really did that.”

Notre Dame trailed by only five points at halftime, but let things get out of hand in the second as they fell behind by as much as 20 points. In spite of the poor offensive post play, the Fighting Irish still shot the ball fairly well, going 10-of-25 (40%) from 3-point range. Forward Nate Laszewski led the team with 20 points in the loss.

Notre Dame dropped to 7-3 on the season with the loss. Mike Brey will hope the Fighting Irish offense can bounce back from their showing against Marquette when they move on to face Georgia at 5:30 p.m. ET on Sunday.