What Notre Dame baseball coach Link Jarrett said about No. 1 ranking

There was no avoiding it. And there wasn’t ever any intention to anyway.

Notre Dame baseball coach Link Jarrett didn’t give the cliche “we don’t hear the outside noise” answer when asked about his team’s No. 1 ranking in the latest Baseball America and Perfect Game national polls. What’s the point in the Irish acting like they’re oblivious to where they stand when in reality it’s quite obvious?

“You’re not going to ignore it,” Jarrett said. “I told them that’s a reflection of how you’ve played.”

Notre Dame is 12-1 and, ironically, fresh off a 12-1 victory over Valparaiso in the home opener at Frank Eck Stadium on Tuesday. The Irish haven’t lost since getting walked off by Delaware in the third game of opening weekend. Ten victories in a row since then, five of which have come against Power Five competition.

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The Irish are tied for the national lead in fielding percentage (.991). They’re tied for the best earned run average (1.66) in the country, too. The hitting has come and gone in waves, but last weekend’s 19 runs in two games against a ranked NC State team gave Jarrett reason to believe his team is coming around at the plate. The Irish have scored at least 11 runs in three of the last four games.

All of those things matter more to Jarrett than the No. 1 ranking. Without them, Notre Dame wouldn’t be No. 1 anyway.

“What matters, to me, and I think they feel it, is how you play,” Jarrett said. “The game doesn’t know how you’re ranked. Is it a confidence thing for the guys? Probably. We played 12 games in a row on the road. We have the toughest travel schedule you could imagine. And when they show up, how they have gone about it should be No. 1. The way they’ve fought through some difficulties to get to the games and to show up and play that way, it’s a nice reward. And it’s a pat on the back. But it really, ultimately doesn’t mean anything.”

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Jarrett’s main concern in addressing the ranking with his players was getting it through to them that a No. 1 ranking should not come with added pressure. This is still the same group of guys who had a No. 3 next to their name in Baseball America’s poll last week. A couple teams ahead of them lost, and they came away with a couple of wins in Raleigh. That is all that’s changed.

Had Texas not tanked and Stanford not lost twice to Oregon, Notre Dame might not be No. 1 today. Jarrett’s job is to make sure the Irish play with the same sense of urgency now as they did when they felt they still had so much to prove. They should still feel that way. What’s a No. 1 ranking mean in March if it isn’t there in May?

“It’s special to be recognized,” senior right fielder Brooks Coetzee III said. “I feel like we haven’t been recognized in the past. But you still have to go out there and perform. We acknowledged it and realized No. 1 means nothing if you don’t go out there and perform.”

If anything, Notre Dame’s rise to the top comes with added expectations. There’s a difference between pressure and expectations. The former is placed on a team by the team itself. Or, a team lets outside influences dictate the way it plays. Neither are good ways to go about it. Expectations, meanwhile, occur when a team realizes it has something special and internally strives to reach attainable goals based on that realization.

Jarrett is all about that.

“As you win, the stakes of what you’re playing for continue to go up,” he said.