To paraphrase Frank the Tank from Old School, if you’re reading this, you already know. The program has been boarded up. The promising freshman. The veteran point guard. The sharpshooting sophomore. Everything. We’re at the Purcell Pavilion. I love you. Frank.
The recent past
It’s not clear what’s next for Notre Dame basketball after a third consecutive season ended in demoralizing disappointment – the Irish didn’t even make the ACC tournament and once again failed to defeat a single ranked opponent. To make matters worse, this was followed by departures from the only three people Irish fans actually wanted to stick around – Jalen Haralson, Markus Burton and Cole Certa, who all went into the transfer portal. (They ended up at Tennessee, Indiana and Clemson respectively.)
Burton missed most of the season with an injury – again – but Haralson showed flashes all season of the kind of player he can become, and Certa was displaying symptoms later in the season of being the kind of efficient long-range bomber any program in America would covet. (Garrett Sundra, Ryder Frost and Sir Mohammed also bounced, though their departures were for obvious reasons less concerning.) Associate head coach Kyle Getter also flew the coop, getting the Cal Baptist head coaching job.
The near future
Prior to the incoming transfer class – which so far includes Winthrop’s Logan Duncomb and Penn’s Ethan Roberts – Notre Dame’s roster next season consisted of a guard who can’t really shoot (Logan Imes), the coach’s two kids (Braeden Shrewsberry and incoming freshman Nick), two returners who have never played (Tommy Ahneman and Brady Stevens, the latter of whom walked on), and two other freshmen (Jonathan Sanderson and Gan-Erdene Salongo, both of La Lumiere School).
It’s unclear why head coach Micah Shrewsberry, who came to Notre Dame with such promise after taking Penn State of all teams to the NCAA Tournament and was highly recommended by the likes of former bosses Brad Stevens and Matt Painter, remains in his position after three straight losing seasons, except that Notre Dame gave him a seven-year contract and doesn’t want to pay to fire him.
They also don’t seem to want to pay to retain their players; rumblings were that none of the three major transfer departures were exactly desperate to get out, but other programs simply are offering them far more money than Notre Dame is. That used to be a pejorative in college sports, but as we all know, schools can pretty much pay whatever they are willing to for talent now, the joke of a House settlement cap notwithstanding.
What to make of this?
Irish basketball fans don’t really know how to react to all of this. We all knew that when then-unbeaten Kentucky slipped by the 2015 Irish in the Elite Eight, they’d missed the best chance we’d ever have to see ND hoops bring home the big prize. (I don’t care what projection models or advanced metrics say – I will go to my grave believing that team would’ve won the national championship.) But we didn’t know ND would only play in three more NCAA second-round games over the next 10 years and make only one tournament (via the play-in, no less) after 2017, with no end to the misery in sight.
What are we even to make of this? The Irish, to say the least, have never been all that interested in playing in what they consider the seedy underbelly of men’s college basketball – not when it was illegal for former ACC coach Will Wade to tell agents what he wants to pay their players, and certainly not after. The program doesn’t generate that much revenue – with rare exception, it never really did – and if ND is going to spend money on basketball, they’re going to do it on the far superior women’s program. In addition, athletic director Pete Bevacqua is telling anyone who will listen that the school is all in on football, which means just about every available cent is going to that program. (To be fair, few of us fans have much of an argument against that.)
We just want some hope
And yet. The basketball team was once, theoretically at least, important enough that ND more or less sold nearly half its football schedule to the ACC to make sure it had a viable home. It’s hard to square that with the current state of the program, which seems to be, in sum, “Out of sight, out of mind.” ND must have (you’d think) ponied up some dough to get the pretty solid on paper recruiting results Shrewsberry delivered his first couple of classes, but when the time came to compensate the team’s best players, nothing was done, and now all of them will contribute to other power-conference teams.
Was it a matter of boosters not wanting to help Shrewsberry, or not seeing the point in doing so given the results? Were the three departures viewed as replaceable, given their efforts didn’t result in any meaningful success anyway? Is this, as ND mouthpiece Jordan Cornette seems to be implying on his various media appearances, merely some sort of retooling and the program is about to get more support? Or is this simply a matter of running out the clock on a coach ND’s lost faith in until his buyout is no longer onerous?
Since no one is speaking frankly on the matter (unlikely to change), we don’t know. All that’s left right now is frustration with the state of things, and, even more frightening, apathy. Just speaking for me, I watched the equivalent of maybe 3 Notre Dame games live this last season. In Mike Brey’s heyday, that was more like a week. And if the program is losing me, a doofus who cares enough to write about Notre Dame on a website, I guarantee people with actual lives are checking out too.
I can only hope a plan exists to create some excitement – and even more than that, some wins – very soon.
Shrewsberry hasn’t coached a fun team or a good team since he’s been here. He has the audacity to call out fans for not showing up, despite his team looking sloppy, unprepared, and even lazy in many games. They do the dumbest things imaginable (shooting 2s while down by 3 with 3 seconds left, for example), that only a poorly coached team would do. He lets his son, a 39% shooter, lead the team in shots. He got this job by finishing 10th in the Big Ten, a season where his team lost 14 games.
The problem with this program is Shrewsberry. Everything else is secondary. The man has no idea how to coach, he hates the few of us fans who have stuck around, and he has no track record of winning basketball games. As long as he is the coach at ND, there is no reason for optimism.
(And Jordan Cornette is a goofball who has rarely ever said a single insightful thing about basketball. Listening to his commentary on any game is a headache)
Is this even a realistic dynamic? Michigan seems to do just fine in many sports. Hell, Vanderbilt is doing alright in football and basketball. ND has more than enough money to allocate to many sports, including basketball.
Michigan (sucks) has a LOT more alumni than Notre Dame does, and the list of ND supporters who care even slightly as much about men’s basketball (and maybe anything else) as they do football could probably fit on a triple spaced Word document.
We can argue ND should provide adequate support to every team on campus and we’d probably be right, but there is an uphill climb element with that sport in particular.
I hate to be too simplistic, but Michigan has *way* more financial resources from having significantly more very wealthy alumni than ND (i.e., ~centimillionaires). And, on top of that, they have a centibillionaire who didn’t even go there helping out the football team’s NIL situation. They can relatively easily do both. We can’t.
Are you saying Notre Dame’s excuse is that they don’t have enough money?
This might be the first time ND has been crying poor.
Also, how does this explain their poor performance compared to the many other schools who have less money and still manage to actually make the tournament and have a competent football team
Michigan only faired well in football while cheating.
You asked why Michigan can do something in this era and we can’t, well, there’s a very obvious answer to that.
We’re all in on football and should be at least we win a natty. It’s not purely zero-sum, but also money is fungible. If the cost of ND being a legitimate title contender in football is that basketball is significantly deemphasized, that seems like a great trade to me.