Notre Dame has potential to become a Big East standard-bearer
In the coming years, when Syracuse no longer is around to bring its booming presence to the Big East Tournament, the conference is going to need some other team to shake down the thunder. The leading candidate to be the home-away-from-home team at the Garden could very well be Notre Dame.
There is no denying the excitement that pervades the arena, awash in orange shirts, whenever Syracuse enters in March. There is no denying that there will be a void when the Orange leaves, with Pittsburgh, for the Atlantic Coast Conference, perhaps as early as 2013. If anyone has the potential to pick up the slack, it is the team that Friday night played in its third consecutive Big East Tournament semifinal.
"I think the Big East really needs Notre Dame to step up once it loses Syracuse, and after it lost Boston College a few years ago," said Marc Ganis, president of SportsCorp Ltd., a Chicago-based sports marketing firm. "It really needs a few teams to step up: Notre Dame, Marquette and DePaul, for a Midwestern presence, because it lost so much of its Eastern power."
No offense to those other two squads, but Notre Dame stands apart with a distinct name, brand and tradition. Granted, those all are much more associated with football, but there is something about hearing the Garden filled with that familiar fight song: "Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame/Wake up the echoes cheering her name,/Send a volley cheer on high/Shake down the thunder from the sky!"
Ganis, a New York-area native, believes it will be difficult yet possible for Notre Dame to make up for Syracuse's absence. "Notre Dame has cachet that transcends the size of the school, the hometowns of the alumni or any geographical region," he said. "It has always been almost a sister school of the New York area. I think a lot of that goes back to the days of showing Notre Dame [football] highlights on Sunday morning with Lindsey Nelson."
What will help more than anything is success, the ingredient that made Syracuse such a Garden fixture. Notre Dame, which faced Louisville in the late game Friday night, was looking to reach the Big East final for the first time. "It's something we've talked about in our program for a while. It's the next step," coach Mike Brey said after a grinding 57-53 overtime win over South Florida late Thursday night.
Notre Dame won in double overtime at Louisville on Jan. 7, and two weeks after that, the Irish beat Syracuse, the only team to do so in the regular season.
