The Last Accolade: Brennan O'Neill Only Cares About a National Title

Brennan O’Neill had barely stepped into a small plaza between buildings on Albany’s campus after Duke’s NCAA quarterfinal victory over Michigan in May before a throng of young boys instantly gravitated toward him.

O’Neill was on his way from a postgame press conference to the locker room. It just took longer than it would for pretty much any other college lacrosse player as O’Neill stopped to sign autographs.

And that was before he won the Tewaaraton Award and MVP of the world championship.

It seems improbable, but there might be an even greater spotlight on O’Neill as he enters his senior year. He’s the first Tewaaraton winner to play a college season after collecting the award since Dylan Molloy was back at Brown in 2017. 

It should come as little surprise he is USA Lacrosse Magazine’s pick for preseason player of the year in 2024. O’Neill has also proven that honor on the field with 12 goals and nine assists through Duke’s 3-0 start. The Blue Devils play Jacksonville on Friday at 6 p.m.

Yet in many ways, this fanfare isn’t new for O’Neill.

“Brennan has been dealing with it his whole life,” Duke offensive coordinator Matt Danowski said. “He’s been dealing with it since he was an eighth-grader, maybe even younger than that. He’s used to people wanting to see him succeed or wanting to see him fail and no in between. It’s par for the course.”

Danowski possesses an interesting perspective. He, too, was a lauded recruit out of Long Island. He, too, chose to come to Duke. He, too, won a Tewaaraton with a year of eligibility to spare.

But the level of scrutiny the two faced at the start of their respective careers is, frankly, incomparable. Chalk some of it up to O’Neill’s considerable abilities. The digital age gets its due, too.

And O’Neill? He’s happy to oblige photo requests from kids. But the thing he wants to do the most is simply play.

“I don’t play the game to prove myself to anyone,” O’Neill said. “I just want to win it with my best friends. It’s something I would cherish and remember for the rest of my life and be able to talk about it with those guys.”

A national championship is just about the only missing accomplishment on his resume. O’Neill helped the Blue Devils reach the NCAA final before falling to Notre Dame, coming so close to joining the likes of Ned Crotty and Jordan Wolf as understated Duke attackmen who led the team to titles.

O’Neill didn’t have the most active fall (Duke limited the on-field work of both he and Team Canada attackman Dyson Williams because of the wear and tear of a college season combined with the world championship), but he was still enough of a presence to be voted one of the Blue Devils’ captains.

“You really want the national championship,” O’Neill said. “It’s not hard to stay hungry and not get complacent when you didn’t do that yet. That would be harder to keep going after a national championship, but it didn’t end the way I would have liked it to or our team would have liked it to.”

O’Neill isn’t the first lacrosse player to arrive in college with a can’t-miss recruiting label, though his was probably larger and better-known than most who came before him. But regardless of era, not everyone lives up to the external expectations.

O’Neill has, all the while staying true to an approach that values time spent with teammates and collective goals above everything else.

“The way Brennan has handled all of it is really remarkable,” Danowski said. “A lot of kids can’t. A lot of kids wouldn’t. In the age of name, image and likeness and being self-absorbed and doing things for clicks or trying to build your brand maybe more than trying to build your game, he just wants to win. He just wants to play lacrosse and have fun and compete with his friends. I don’t think there’s anybody like him in that regard, and I don’t know if there will be anybody like him to follow.”

All of which means there are two near-certainties about O’Neill’s final season at Duke. One, plenty with ties to the sport will have their eye on O’Neill. And two, O’Neill will process it while concentrating on the things that matter most to him.

“It’s really not difficult,” O’Neill said. “There’s harder things I could be going through as a 21-year-old person, and I think as I reach adulthood and go to the real world, there will be a lot harder things than a little attention for a sport that I play for fun.”