Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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UNDER THE DOME 1946, until Dec. 4, 1948, sandwiched between the ties. Thus, history was made this past school year when head coach Muffet McGraw's women's basketball squad began the year 37‑0 before losing to 40‑0 Connecticut in the NCAA Tourna‑ ment championship game April 8. The 37 consecutive victories are the most at the school since at least 1950. "The excitement that our women's team created on campus this year was in a lot of ways very similar to what football did when we went un‑ defeated," Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly said of the 12‑0 regular season in 2012, before his team lost 42‑14 to Alabama in the BCS National Championship Game. "There was a great excitement on campus. Our players were talking about it. "When our players are talking about it and it gets their attention, you know that's it's been pretty exciting on cam‑ pus." What gets Kelly's attention more is the consistent excellence, which has re‑ sulted in four consecutive Final Fours — and probably many more in the future based on its recruiting success. "That consistency is what all of our programs here at Notre Dame, in par‑ ticular football, want to aspire to," Kelly said. "That consistency year in and year out, playing for champion‑ ships. "[Head coach] Muffet [McGraw] is really the one that's been able to do that. She's kind of set the bar real high and we're all proud of her ac‑ complishments and our women's bas‑ ketball team, even though they fell short. Clearly, we would have loved to have been full strength [with se‑ nior 6‑3 forward Natalie Achonwa, who was sidelined with an ACL tear], not to take anything away from what UConn did. They're an extraordinary basketball program, and we're ex‑ tremely proud of our ladies." When speaking of longest team winning streaks at Notre Dame since 1950, we separate them from fenc‑ ing. Mike DeCicco's fencers won 122 straight dual meets from 1975‑80 (with national titles in 1977 and 1978), and the women fencers won 89 con‑ secutive dual meets from 2009‑11. However, the NCAA championship in that sport is determined by in‑ dividual titles adding up to a team victory, not necessarily true head‑to‑ head team matches. Thus, here are the top 10 winning streaks at Notre Dame since 1950: 1. WOMEN'S BASKETBALL (2013-14) — 37-0 This included 13 wins against ranked teams, eight of them versus the top 10. Until the loss to UConn, Notre Dame had won 67 of its last 68 games, with the Huskies the spoiler again in last year's Final Four. 2. WOMEN'S SOFTBALL (2001) — 33 In head coach Liz Miller's final sea‑ son before retiring from Notre Dame, the 54‑7 Irish climbed as high as No. 8 in the country and dominated the Big East during the regular season to achieve the program's first No. 1 seed. They won two games in the NCAA Tournament before getting eliminated by Iowa.