ESPN analyst Paul Carcaterra helped call No. 1 Notre Dame's 15-10 victory at No. 8 Duke on Saturday and will provide commentary for Sunday's showdown between Big Ten rivals Ohio State and Michigan. Carcaterra, the former Syracuse midfielder who can be followed on Twitter at @paulcarcaterra, discussed the Fighting Irish's lack of obvious vulnerabilities, the Blue Devils' precarious position and races in several conferences.
After watching Notre Dame's 15-10 victory at Duke, do you perceive any weaknesses in the Fighting Irish?
I look at Notre Dame and I feel like this is not only the most talented team in [head coach] Kevin Corrigan's 27 years that he's been in South Bend, [Indiana], but I also think it's the most talented [nationally]. I give him and his staff a lot of credit. They continue to kind of tweak things and play to their players' strengths.
I think this is another team where that's really shining through and I mean that by their athleticism and their ability to strike in transition. They're playing fast, and they're a team that has stars at all three levels on the field. They have [junior] Matt Kavanagh, one of the top attackmen in the country. [Sophomore] Sergio Perkovic certainly has the potential to be the top middie, and [junior] Matt Landis has been a lockdown defender.
[Sophomore goalkeeper] Shane Doss is one of the bigger surprises in college lacrosse. Here's a kid who lost the job midway through last year and [then-junior] Conor Kelly goes on to help them win the ACC title and get to the national championship. But Doss continued to work hard and get that spot this year. He's been fantastic.
You have the superstars, you have the guys taking over games. I think [sophomore] P.J. Finley at the faceoff X will really have to play great lacrosse down the stretch for this team to win a national title. I don't think they necessarily have to be over 50 percent, but he just can't get dominated in big-time matchups like [sophomore] Ben Williams of Syracuse or [freshman] Trevor Baptiste of Denver.
Notre Dame can go under 50 percent and still win ball games because they're so clean in other aspects of the game and they play great on the wings. So there's a lot of pressure they can put on a faceoff guy if he gets it, and that has kind of offset some of their weaknesses in the past at the X. But P.J. Finley just can't get dominated. I think this team is certainly going to be a Final Four team and a challenge for a national title.
With Duke losing three in a row for the first time since 2004, how much trouble are the Blue Devils in?
I still think coach John Danowski will get the maximum out of that team. I don't know if this maximum gets them back to the Final Four, but I wouldn't be shocked if he was able to get that team rolling.
My biggest concern for Duke right now is their lack of playmaking on attack. [Freshman] Justin Guterding is a big-time lefty scorer, but he's not creating his own shot. [Junior] Case Matheis has been a little nicked up, and [sophomore] Jack Bruckner is a converted middie. They don't have a real strong, playmaking attack presence, and I think opponents now are just guarding them up top and making the back guys in the attack group beat you one-on-one without slide help. So all of the slide help and support from opposing teams is coming at the midfield and until that attack steps up, I think Duke is going to struggle in some games offensively.
The beauty of last year's team was you had one of the great attackmen in the last decade in Jordan Wolf. He just took so much pressure off of [then-sophomore midfielder] Myles Jones and Christian Walsh and [then-sophomore midfielder] Deemer Class because you had to defend Duke below goal-line extended. Now you don't have to defend Duke below goal-line extended. So there's a weakness offensively at the attack playmaking, and they're young.
I think they're definitely going to be very good down the road defensively. I think they have good athletes with good size and good feet, but they're green. There's four new starters with long-poles and there's hardly any experience coming into the season for Duke. That's tough for a young goalie like [sophomore] Danny Fowler.
With then-No. 6 Cornell losing to Harvard and then-No. 10 Brown falling to Penn, is the Ivy League wide open?
The Ivy League is wide open, but it's also confusing to follow and track any trends because I think anyone can really beat anyone in that league. You have a team like [No. 7] Yale that can certainly win that league. Yale plays a really good brand of blue-collar lacrosse. They're tough, they scrap on ground balls, and Andy Shay and his staff are as good as it gets in college lacrosse in terms of developing talent.
You obviously have [No. 10] Cornell, which probably has the best star power with guys like [senior midfielder Connor] Buczek and [senior attackman Matt] Donovan and [senior defenseman Jordan] Stevens. [No. 12] Brown's playing really, really fast. Harvard's always had studs on its team and recruits really well. [No. 18] Princeton has shown that it can play solid lacrosse, too.
This league is wide open and is very difficult to put a finger on. There's three or four teams thast can definitely win it and going into the Ivy League championship weekend, you'd be hard pressed to even say who the favorite is.
Navy has a half-game lead on Colgate and No. 19 Loyola Maryland in the Patriot League. Are the Midshipmen the favorites there?
Loyola showed me this weekend that when they play their best, they're a good lacrosse team. Navy has really rebounded and I give coach Rick Sowell and his staff a lot of credit. There were a lot of people critical of what was going down in Annapolis the last couple years, and I for one questioned the long-term success of the program. But Coach Sowell has figured it out and has done a fantastic job with this group. They're really young, too.
I like Loyola, though, because I feel like they've played in a lot of big games out-of-conference and that will show down the stretch. When you're playing teams like Duke and Georgetown – and these seniors have played against Hopkins and Denver and have played in a Final Four – I think success breeds success. The expectations will be high for Loyola to win that league.
Colgate is a team to me that is really, really good, skilled offensively, and they blow-torched Loyola down at Loyola. I think it's a three-team race with regards to the standings, but another team you could throw into the mix that will certainly give all of those teams all they can handle – and if they get to the Patriot League tournament, I wouldn't be surprised if they won it – is [No. 13] Army.
Army has the best player in the Patriot League in [senior attackman] John Glesener. I think that kid is an absolute stud, and he can take over games. He's that good. He's a special player. What he does athletically and from the outside frightens players. So it's a four-team race.
No. 15 Towson and No. 20 Fairfield are the only two teams with unblemished records in the Colonial Athletic Association and will square off on Saturday. How much of an advantage will the winner have?
That is going to be an awesome. I have a ton of respect for what Fairfield has done. They had four one-goal losses at the beginning of the season. So everyone kind of wrote them off with regards to where they were. Any time you look at a team in late February or the beginning of March and they're 2-4, you kind of forget about them. But if you really look at the talent they brought back offensively, their best three players were back, and they've really started to gel again with a nice [five-game] winning streak.
I feel like Fairfield's a team that is playing the most consistent and the best in that league. But Towson has tested itself out-of-conference – playing Loyola, playing Georgetown, playing Johns Hopkins. I have to say that the out-of-conference schedule for Towson favors them with regards to being battle-tested against big-time opposing teams, but Fairfield really believes in itself. And any time you can rebound after losing so many games by one goal, that says a lot about your leadership and ability to stay the course.
How serious would the loss of senior faceoff specialist Charlie Raffa be for No. 3 Maryland?
Huge. Raffa not only from a skills standpoint is a top-3 faceoff man, but he has been in some big moments in his career at Maryland, and I feel like he's a kid who has always played in big games. He's athletic, he's tough as nails. He's played with injuries all four years. He's taken a beating over his four years.
I hope to see him again because he's the type of player who changes thew way that they play at Maryland because they have a pretty inexperienced offense with the loss of some big-time playmakers like [attackman Mike] Chanenchuk to graduation and [sophomore attackman Connor] Cannizzaro to transfer. They're a ball-control offense, their defense is as stingy as can, and they're winning draws. If you have great goaltending, are playing solid D, and are winning faceoffs, you can dictate tempo, and your inexperienced offense which might not be one of thew top groups in the nation can still score goals and wear down teams. Raffa gives them that opportunity to do it. T
he positive for Maryland is [junior] Jon Garino Jr. has been really good every time he's been called upon. But he's never been asked to be the guy week in and week out. I think if Raffa is out for an extended period of time, teams are really going to focus on what Garino does, and he won't just be that change-of-pace guy. He's going to have to take 25 draws in a game, and there's going to be more tape out on him and people are going to try to exploit any flaws and deficiencies that he has in his game. … He might step up and answer the bell. That's to be seen, and if Raffa's not around, there's going to be a lot riding on that kid.