Michigan was buried 7-3 on Friday night by Notre Dame. Billy Sauer couldn't stop anything, Steve Jakiel didn't look much better, and the offense was off just enough to never make a game of it.
Yikes. There's not much to say about Sauer's performance. The first goal was an Osgood Special – the Irish cycled the puck back to the blue line, there was a shooting lane, and Sauer just whiffed. Terrible goal. Rebounds plagued him all night and were the proximal cause of two Notre Dame goals. The Irish got another off of a deflection and one off of a blocked shot that came back to a Notre Dame player.
After Sauer was lifted at the start of the third, Steve Jakiel came in and let a pair of goals go by, and they weren't particularly good ones. One was a deflection that beat him five-hole, and another was a backhand that went over his shoulder.
For the Irish, David Brown wasn't having a shut-down evening, but he was playing well. He stopped several quality chances for Michigan in the first period and was bailed out just as frequently by our own players missing opportunities or being just out of position to capitalize on mistakes. And any time we managed to get a goal, we gave it right back on the other side of the ice.
You can't blame the defense too much when the goalie gives up 5 on only 16 shots, but I wasn't impressed. Notre Dame is a much larger team than we are, and they were working our guys down low just about every time I cared to look. With Johnson out of the lineup (and Dest, even), we didn't have the size to match up with the Irish effectively. We made some nice hits, but those don't directly translate into physical play.
On Sunday, we went over to South Bend and turned in a better performance, but let a 3-2 lead slip away with two goals in the third. Now the team has three weeks to think about this sweep before the GLI.
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