Notre Dame women’s basketball blows by Oklahoma, sets up Sweet 16 game against NC State
Dara Mabrey backpedaled, flashed two universal hand signs for a three-pointer and shrugged her shoulders. The Notre Dame senior guard just connected on her seventh three of Monday’s second round NCAA Tournament game against Oklahoma.
Sometimes, even the sharpest of shooters don’t know how the ball can be such a magnet for the bottom of the basket. It just happens. That was true for Mabrey at the Lloyd Noble Center in Norman, Okla.
“I felt like I was unconscious there at one point and wasn’t thinking,” Mabrey said. “I just knew when I caught it I was going to let it go, and it was going in.”
Mabrey’s 7-of-12 three-point performance tied a record for the most threes made in an NCAA Tournament game by a Fighting Irish player. She landed on the list alongside her sister, Marina, and vowed someday soon she’d pass her up. Something about Mabreys in March. This Mabrey’s game-high 29 points paced No. 5 seed Notre Dame (24-8) in a record-breaking 108-64 victory over No. 4 seed Oklahoma (25-9).
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Mabrey hit five threes in the first quarter alone. She even banked one in. That’s when everyone in the gym and watching from home knew it was her night. The Irish eclipsed 30-plus points in the first frame for the second straight game. Unlike Saturday’s matchup against UMass, they never had to look back. The game was never close.
“We just came out dripping in confidence,” Mabrey said. “And when Notre Dame plays confident, we’re really hard to stop.”
BOX SCORE
Notre Dame sprinted through the Norman portion of the Bridgeport Region by racking up a combined 197 points in two games. Notre Dame shot 55.6% from the floor as a team across the pair of victories. The Irish are playing as well offensively as they have all season and will face No. 1 seed NC State, who Notre Dame beat 69-66 in South Bend on Feb. 1, in the Sweet 16 on Saturday.
Notre Dame had never scored 100 points in an NCAA Tournament game before Monday. Even with all the Final Four appearances and two national championships, this group of relatively inexperienced Irish found a way to break that barrier. And because of it, they’re not done. They have more to play for.
“I don’t have any words,” head coach Niele Ivey said. “This is something I prayed about. This is something I knew could come to life. I’m over the moon. I’m so proud of this team and our journey and to see how far we’ve come last season. We worked so hard to get to this point. We’ve had a lot of highs and a lot of lows, and it’s incredible to see them blossom in front of my eyes.”
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Oklahoma head coach Jennie Baranczyk said the remaining teams in the tournament field need to “watch out” if Notre Dame keeps playing like it did against her Sooners. The Irish went into a hostile environment and completely took the game away from the opening tip.
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Graduate senior center Maya Dodson drew a foul in the offensive paint 11 seconds in. Mabrey made her first three 51 seconds in. It didn’t even take the Irish one minute to show the Sooners they were going to strike from all over — inside, outside and everywhere in between.
It’s possible to have such a wide-ranging attack with a point guard like Olivia Miles. The freshman flirted with a triple-double less than 48 hours after dropping one on UMass. She finished with nine points, seven rebounds and 12 assists.
“In transition, they were sprinting to the paint, so thats how I was finding Dara, Sonia [Citron] and Maddy [Westbeld],” Miles said. “I was able to see the floor and able to spread them out. We were getting good looks, and I was hitting the hot hand.”
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Dodson scored 20 points on 8-of-11 shooting. Citron scored 25 thanks in large part to an automatic 11-of-11 showing at the free throw line. Westbeld was the third Irish player in double figures with 13. Notre Dame only got seven points from the bench, but even those players did everything Ivey asked of them.
Junior guard Anaya Peoples and senior guard Abby Prohaska brought toughness defensively that allowed Notre Dame to hold the nation’s No. 3 scoring offense well below its season-long average of 83.3 points per game. The Irish held a 50-28 paint points advantage and a 34-8 positive margin in fast break points.
Oklahoma had the best three-point shooter in the country this season. Senior guard Taylor Robertson made more threes than any other player nationally. Monday, Mabrey made more than twice as many as Robertson, who was 3-of-10 from distance and often flustered by a stingy Notre Dame defense playing man-to-man inside of its usual 2-3 zone.
Everything clicked for Ivey. Everything.
“We haven’t had a game yet where we were really good on both sides of the ball for the entire game,” Ivey said. “Our offense was exactly how I envisioned it as far as our pace. We shot the ball well, did a great job of shot selection and established an inside game. We ran. Defensively, we raised our level against a really great offensive team. That was my first time as a head coach seeing so much balance on both sides of the ball… We dominated for four quarters.”
Keep doing that, and like Baranczyk said, this Notre Dame will keep dancing.
