It’s been a long two months since it was announced that Mike Brey would not return as Notre Dame’s head coach. Rumors and speculation of perceived favorites were only outnumbered by the growing number of losses to close out Brey’s time.
But on Wednesday, Notre Dame and Jack Swarbrick got their guy. Reports filtering out that Micah Shrewsberry will be the next Men’s Basketball Head Coach at Notre Dame.
BREAKING: Micah Shrewsberry is leaving Penn State after two seasons and finalizing a 7-year deal to be the next coach at Notre Dame, sources told @CBSSports. Shrewsberry has been ND’s top target for the past two weeks—but talks didn’t begin until PSU was knocked out of the NCAAT.
— Matt Norlander (@MattNorlander) March 22, 2023
Shrewsberry has spent the last 3 years at Penn State, building up a long dormant program and leading them to a #10 seed and first round win over Texas A&M. He’s an Indiana guy, playing in high school at Cathedral HS in Indianapolis and in college at southern Indiana’s Hanover College. As a coach, he served as an assistant under both Brad Steven’s at Butler (on their Final Four teams) and the Boston Celtics and Matt Painter at Purdue. He’s even familiar with the immediate area after a brief stint at IU-South Bend.
He has a reputation as both a good recruiter and smart offensive mind. Speculation has already begun about which recruits will follow Shrewsberry to Notre Dame, and it’s hard not to be excited about the value that can bring for a quick bounce back to a lackluster year.
Welcome to Notre Dame, Coach Shrewsberry!
This is super exciting. Great to have some buzz around the basketball program for the first time in a while.
Also, kind of interesting that all the big-ish programs with open jobs are all seemingly getting their top-choice candidates; works for me!
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/23/opinion/college-sports-student-athletes-education.html
Swarbrick having an, uh, interesting week.
Eh, that’s pretty benign and boring. “College athletes should be able to make money off their NIL because other students can, but they shouldn’t be professional athletes.” Not exactly revolutionary stuff there. I’m sure fans of, like, Georgia and Auburn will lose their shit over it.
Anywho, great hire in Shrewsberry. I think this is ND basketball’s first hire from another P6 program in…ever? At least since Digger.
*sadly sets the “Days Since ND Administration Has Been Publicly Embarrassing” counter back to 0*
This is not nearly as bad as what I was expecting when I saw that Jenkins had an NYT op-ed.
Yeah I’m with you on this, I was bracing for something worse upon opening it up. Not really sure what good this does, but at least they can feel like they’ve said their piece.
Could be worse, but lamenting that people view college athletics is a business when (in Swarbrick’s case) you make seven figures, spearheaded a half-billion dollar construction project around a football stadium on campus, almost assuredly, and just agreed to pay a $4M buyout to get a coach is… rich.
It’s a bad argument that’s disconnected from reality, and Swarbrick and Jenkins are exactly the wrong people to be making it.
Swarbrick inserting himself into this is just hilarious. Multiple outlets have reported he’s the highest paid Athletic Director in the country. His son profits off of Notre Dame Athletics (works for Under Armour). His daughter profits off of Notre Dame Athletics (works for NBC Universal). Why in the world should he get to be the arbiter of who profits off of ND athletics?
Yeah the oddly placed “almost assuredly” in my post above was a partial failure to edit out a reference to him getting helping his kids get their jobs in a manner adjacent to college sports, which I edited out because it felt like a bit of a cheap shot but upon further reflection if you’re literally writing NYT op-eds on this topic you’ve opened yourself up to that criticism.
Yeah this wasn’t as awful as I assumed it would be. It was more bland than bad
Guess I’ll have to be the one to defend it.
I actually like the article a good deal. John and Jack are out there defending the model ND has been using against the school-in-name-only path that the SEC and Big 10 are trying to drag college sports into by turning CFB into NFL lite and letting everything else wither. Might as well lay out an alternative path forward for the programs that don’t want to do that, while still letting players earn actual NIL money.
I actually think there are some good ideas buried in there. College athletes should not be professional athletes, NIL needs nationwide rules, there should be a medical trust for athletes, etc.
But ND’s leadership hand-wringing about how college sports became big business is hypocritical. ND has been leading that charge for literally 100 years. How did we get here? Because ND wants to be here.
I agree that the top halves of the SEC and B1G are headed toward something akin to the NFL. I do not believe for one second that Swarbrick and Jenkins would not jump on that train if it’s more profitable to do so, which it will be.
If Jenkins and Swarbrick feel this strongly, then they need to start gathering a similarly-minded group of schools rather than just cashing ACC checks and waiting for the GOR to expire.
Upon a re-read I don’t think substantively it’s entirely off-base either. We’re just the wrong messengers – particularly Swarbrick. This would probably be better coming from the president of Davidson or something. Then we’d have to really pick a lane – the Davidson approach or “taking college football seriously” approach. I prefer the latter, but I understand the appeal of the former.
The people on Twitter getting mad about them bringing up non-revenue sports are just delusional, though – these things are absolutely in tension, and if you want football players to make closer to their market value, it will necessarily detract from non-revenue sports at best and be in strong tension if not in direct conflict with Title IX. People need to be honest about that with themselves.
On your second paragraph — I understand why people perceive that as basically a threat saying, “If you make us pay football players, we’ll gut women’s sports.”
But here’s the problem — if a football player is an employee, why shouldn’t a women’s soccer player be? An person’s employee status isn’t determined by how much revenue they generate. Making football players employees will probably require making all athletes employees, and I doubt universities want to take on that expense. So, to comply with both employment law and Title IX, schools would probably just have a pro football team, pro MBB team, and a small handful of other pro sports that don’t turn a profit.
What I think will probably happen is that football teams will be separated from the university entirely. The University of Alabama won’t have a football team. It’ll just license its branding and lease its stadium to Crimson Tide Football, Inc.
Really hoping some of those recruits follow him to Notre Dame, because things are a little bleak on the roster right now. This coaching search seems to have gone about as well as it could. A really solid local guy who has exactly the experience required for the job.
Huge get there. Being the pessimist I am, I was expecting Shrewsberry to either get a giant raise from Penn State or take one of the other high profile jobs. Swarbrick definitely made up for the seeming ineptness of the OC search.
You’re not alone. We were preparing the pitchforks when nothing got announced early in the week. Glad they were able to get their top choice.
I was pretty confident all week Shrewsberry would come, although admittedly given what he was looking for in terms of admin support it would have for sure been a huge disappointment had he not.
The fact he’s coming suggests he got enough positive feedback on what he wants that we can feel good about ND’s investment in basketball.
I’m a very casual basketball fan, but this hire makes me wonder about the claims (mostly from NDN) that ND does not sufficiently support the MBB program. Maybe ND’s attitude toward the program changed dramatically in the last month or so, but given how long Swarbrick has been around, I kind of doubt it.
I think there’s room for a little bit of both. The most likely scenario is “targeted investment”. That they’re not willing to fire unlimited dollars at certain pet projects with unproven returns, but spending up on a head coach is a spot where you need to be aggressive.
I don’t know that we’ll ever know all the things that Brey asked for behind the scenes, and which ones he got and which he didn’t. Or which of those things MS is able to turn from a no to a yes. It’d certainly be interesting to learn.
The one we’ll learn fairly quickly is the status of transfers. Brey was unable to get almost any undergrad transfers through, but with the depleted roster we have now, we’ll find out if anything has changed on that front in a matter of weeks.
That’s helpful, thanks!
Are we sure Brey was unable to get undergrad transfers because of ND restrictions? The guy often struggled to recruit high school players; it wouldn’t surprise me if he had similar struggles when it came to undergrad transfers.
If ND does have too harsh of restrictions, I would be curious as to what they are.
I don’t think we *know* anything for certain, but it’s definitely been the speculation.
I think that’s also been true on the football side – the number of undergrad transfers across the board has been very, very small.
Is there truth to the idea that it’s harder for ND to get undergrad BB transfers now, because players no longer have to sit out a year? Previously a player had a year to catch up academically if need be. Now they don’t.
When I heard that, it made a lot of sense.
Also, I think the same could have applied to Alohi Gilman too, one of the rare FB under-grad transfers was athletically ineligible for his initial year at ND. He also would have had the time to catch up, courtesy of I believe was a punitive move the Navy foisted on him on the way out. That situation wouldn’t apply these days either.
Gilman signed with Navy when the academy had a rule allowing athletes to defer service while they pursued a pro career after graduation, and while he was there they rescinded that rule. The fact that he wasn’t given a waiver for that was completely absurd.
I think this is a big point that I didn’t get time to make in the piece above. There’s discrepancies about what his actual salary is, but Shrewsberry had a $4M buyout and was in line for a raise (regardless of what his prev salary was). There’s almost no way to avoid landing on “ND ponied up to get Micah”.
As Andy said, that’s a really good sign, regardless of what you think of Shrewsberry specifically.
This is where I’m at too. I think Shrewsberry was PROBABLY the right person to target. A 10th place and 9th place finish in the conference and 1 NCAA Tournament win is definitely a short track record though.
But even if he ends up only being here for the short-run, this certainly shows that the athletic department is willing to make a significant investment in the Basketball Program.
I wonder if the OC debacle – and, more relevantly, the overwhelming blowback against ND appearing to not want to spend top-dollar, which I think caught the admin off-guard a bit – might have affected this at all.