Jordan Faison’s football commitment ate into the start of his sophomore lacrosse season for two-time defending national champ Notre Dame and asked for more of a multi-task from the Irish wide receiver/midfielder during March and April than last year.
Which makes the 5-foot-10, 182-pound two-sport star a bit of a wild card, perhaps in the best way possible, as the eighth-ranked and unseeded Irish (8-4) begin their quest for a third straight title, Sunday on the road in Columbus, Ohio against fourth-seeded/second-ranked, Ohio State (14-2).
Another football/lacrosse double-dipper, ACC Freshman of the Year Matt Jeffery, will miss the game with an upper-body injury, per Irish coach Kevin Corrigan.
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The Buckeyes edged Notre Dame in South Bend, 10-9, back on March 8. The 40th-ever meeting between the two teams is set for noon EDT on ESPN2. The winner advances to a quarterfinal matchup in Annapolis, Md., next Sunday, May 18, against 5 seed Penn State (11-4)/ The Nittany Lions overcame a late, one-goal deficit for a first-round tourney win over Colgate, 13-11.
“It definitely takes a little bit more to get into end-of-the-season shape,” Faison said earlier this week before practice, “but the team helps me. The coaches help me. I’m getting back to that, so I’m feeling good.
“I’m definitely ascending. You’ve got to be at this point in the season. It’s win or go home, so you’ve got to put it all out there right now.”
Faison’s last football game of the 2024 season came less than four months ago, against Ohio State, on Jan. 20 in the CFP National Championship Game at Atlanta. He had one catch for six yards, a one-yard run and threw a two-point conversion pass in ND’s 34-23 loss to the Buckeyes.
On the season, Faison was ND’s fourth-leading receiver with 30 catches for 356 yards and a TD, despite missing three games and being limited in several others by an early season ankle injury.
Corrigan gave Faison as much time as he needed before even practicing with the team once football ended to give him time to recharge. He joined the Irish for game 3 against Georgetwon on Feb. 22 and scored his first goal of the season in the fourth period of that game, an 11-9 victory.
But spring football started on March 19, and Faison was much more active in spring football practices this year. Meanwhile, his lacrosse numbers are down from his sensational freshman season in the spring of 2024 — eight goals and three assists this spring so far versus 22 goals and eight assists last season.
“It’s the last month of your season, but for Jordan, he’s been in season for about 600 of the last 660 days,” Corrigan said. “Imagine that — the first two years of your college experience as a student, as an athlete and everything else. So, I think he’s done an amazing job of kind of keeping himself motivated on a daily basis and all that.
“But there’s a price to be paid for trying to do everything. And that’s part of the deal.”
Faison’s younger brother, Dylan Faison, plans to follow the same path beginning with the fall of 2026. The junior at Boca Raton (Fla.) St. Andrew’s is a three-star wide receiver commit and one of the top high school lacrosse players. His team reached the Florida Class 1A state championship game, but lost on Saturday to Palm Gardens The Benjamin School, 14-11.
Grad senior Tyler Buchner, a third football/lacrosse participant, has played in 10 games for the Irish lacrosse team as a reserve, with six ground balls to his credit.
“It’s been an interesting path,” Corrigan said of a team that started the season No. 1 in the polls. “We haven’t had the same lineup through a week of practice since we’ve started this year. And nothing tragic, nothing permanent, but just a series of things that I think have kept us a little off balance.
“So it’s been a bit of a journey that way. At this point, we’re as healthy as we are — not as healthy as we could be. But we just have to know what we have and play with a good sense of ourselves at this point, because we’ve kind of been in every situation that we can be in.”
Notre Dame and Richmond, the latter a 13-10 first-round NCAA Tourney upset winner over 8 seed North Carolina on Saturday, are the only two teams nationally ranked in the top 10 in both scoring offense and scoring defense.
Last year’s NCAA Tourney’s Most Outstanding Player, Chris Kavanagh, leads that Irish offense with 33 goals and 23 assists. Last week he was named one of five finalists for the lacrosse equivalent of the Heisman — the Tewaaraton Trophy.
His older brother Pat, now with the Premier Lacrosse League’s Denver Outlaws, was last year’s winner and still talks to Chris every day.
“He gives me some positive things and some things to work on every day,” Chris said. “There’s always things to work on. He’s always in my ear.”
Sunday marks Notre Dame’s 28th NCAA run and the eighth for Ohio State, which is coming off a 6-9 season.
The Irish have looked at times like a team that’s capable of being the first team since Princeton in 1996-98 to reach the pinnacle of the sport three years in a row. And at times, they’ve looked like a team in a minor rebuild.
“You want to be an underdog and mad at this point,” Faison said. “We know what team we are. We know where we’ve been. We know what we can do. We’ve just got to go out there and prove it and show it.”
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