Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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BLUEGOLDONLINE.COM MAY 2023 5 M ike Brey needed only a brief tour of the Notre Dame basketball fa- cilities 23 years ago to realize he had to do more with less. One stroll into the old non-exclusive practice facility known as "The Pit" re- vealed a soulless space buried in a base- ment. One glance at the green and pur- ple seats of the old Joyce Center showed a building opened in 1968 that never left 1968 behind. He quickly learned he had to deal with it. "Just put your head down and work," Brey recalled. "I don't have time to fight people on campus. My feeling was, ev- erybody's going to do the best they can, and let's do it." His successor, though, inherits no second-rate digs. Micah Shrewsberry, hired March 22, will hold his first practice as Notre Dame head coach in sparkling Rolfs Hall, a four- year-old facility that has a practice court, weight room, offices and nutrition sta- tion dedicated solely to the men's team. He will coach his first game in a fresh home arena. He will drive every day to a job that will reportedly pay him around $4 million per year and work for a school that forked over a $4 million buyout to hire him. Brey needed 19 and eight years, re- spectively, to get those facility boosts. He never hit the pay figure Shrewsberry received on his first contract. Twenty-three years can change a lot of things — six Notre Dame head football coaches, for instance — but the stark- est contrast between the job Brey took in July 2000 and the one Shrewsberry accepted this year is the school's dem- onstrated intent with men's basketball. Notre Dame didn't build new facilities to kick around the bottom third of the ACC standings. It didn't pry Shrews- berry away from another high-major job at Penn State and a lucrative exten- sion to go eight straight seasons without an NCAA Tournament appearance, as 1991-99 head coach John MacLeod did. Or even one tournament in six seasons, which Brey did before stepping aside. Hiring Shrewsberry at the price point it did and from the job it did was the strongest sign yet that Notre Dame means business in men's basketball. That it doesn't see the two Elite Eights and 12 tournament appearances in Brey's first 17 years as a mirage, but a reasonable outlook. Brey, upon his hir- ing, stared down a 10-year tournament drought and thought, "Why not us?" Shrewsberry will operate under the ex- pectation that "it better be us." Notre Dame competed with the Big East's best and the ACC's titans at its prior height. That's the goal again. The thing is, though, even with the mone- tary investment in a coach and facilities, it's not the same job as Duke or North Carolina. It's a harder one — especially in the NIL and transfer portal era. It's at a school where football consumes the oxygen and tops the list of priorities. The men's basketball head coach at Notre Dame still needs to win the harder way, even if the job has raised its expectations. And for that, Shrewsberry is an ideal fit. He just came from a job where all the same is true. Penn State went 23-14 and reached the Big Ten Tournament championship game as well as the NCAA Tournament's sec- ond round this season, just two years into the 46-year-old Shrewsberry's tenure. The Nittany Lions had not won an NCAA game since 2001 and had not reached the field since 2011. Pat- rick Chambers, the head coach from 2011-20, missed the tournament each of his first eight years and was brought back for a ninth. That's a bold-faced statement of in- tent. Interest in the Penn State program was, at best, intermittent. Even with re- newed vigor, it is decidedly not Indiana or Michigan State. But Shrewsberry competed with both and beat both this season. The team's on- court formula was not unlike Brey's best years: veterans who meshed, played smart basketball and produced a high-end of- fense. The roster was built in a way Notre Dame can build one in the current climate. Penn State had one of the nation's most efficient offenses (No. 13 in Division I, per KenPom.com), elite three-point shooting accuracy (38.7 percent, ninth) and steady ball security (seventh in turnover rate). Its rotation's average Division I experience was 4.09 years, which led the country. The Nittany Lions had five players who averaged 20 minutes per game in 2022: four fifth-year players and a regular se- nior. Their engine was guard Jalen Pick- ett, who transferred from Siena shortly after Shrewsberry's arrival and became an All-American in his second season. Behind them, Penn State had a five- man freshman class with two former top-150 recruits and a 2023 signing class that included top-75 player Carey Booth. It won't be confused for Indiana's roster or recruiting rankings, just like Brey's best teams weren't mistaken for Duke or North Carolina. The Irish didn't build a roster with high-profile transfers. They don't take high volumes of undergrad transfers or attract many five-stars. They're not an NIL force. That all applied to Shrewsberry's 2022-23 Penn State team and how he as- sembled it. He won anyway, a testament to the impact of having smart players and pieces that fit together. That's the model Brey used to thrive. Meshing a style of play and a job's con- straints to maximize its potential was among his greatest achievements at Notre Dame. The formula might be the piece of his tenure that lasts the longest after his departure, even with Notre Dame making clear it's not the same job he once held. ✦ ENGEL'S ANGLE PATRICK ENGEL Patrick Engel has been a writer for Blue & Gold Illustrated since March 2020. He can be reached at pengel@blueandgold.com Shrewsberry built a winning team at Penn State, one of the more difficult high-major jobs. PHOTO BY STEVE MANUEL Micah Shrewsberry Still Must Win The Hard Way