On April 22nd Muffet McGraw shocked the college basketball world by stepping down from the Notre Dame Fighting Irish after 33 seasons in South Bend and 38 seasons overall as a head coach. As we deal with the current pandemic in a time without sports–and a college season that never concluded–it feels like a bizarre retirement without the appropriate closure.

Upon closer inspection, Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said that they had been working on a succession plan for two years and now it begins to make more sense this wasn’t some sudden epiphany. It never feels right when legends decide to walk away but when it’s their time, it’s their time. McGraw was able to shed more light on her reasoning as well, and today we’ll talk about that with her 5 greatest legacies she’s leaving behind from a storied career.

Building a Winner

Just over two years ago I wrote an article for 18S debating whether McGraw was the best coach ever at Notre Dame. For all sports. In that piece, I mentioned:

The best part of this is that McGraw is far from done in her career.

Well now! Since that quote was published McGraw only coached 70 more games for the Irish.

Of course, you don’t become a legend by being merely okay on the court. McGraw took over in 1987-88 for a Notre Dame program that was coming off 2 straight conference titles in the little North Star league competing against schools like DePaul and Xavier. Within a year the Irish jumped up to the Midwestern Conference where progress was slow. For the next 7 years, McGraw toiled away with some good teams but only a couple NCAA first round exits to her name.

Things changed quickly when the Irish entered the Big East for the 1995-96 season. At a time when the men’s program was seemingly going backwards, McGraw had the women’s program ascending quickly.

Within two years of the new conference home she reached the school’s first Final Four. By the 5th season, the program had reached a trio of Sweet Sixteens. In the 6th season in the Big East, McGraw grabbed a National Championship.

Success was hard to maintain though during an era where UConn and Tennessee were operating on a different planet than the rest of the country, and college basketball history for that matter. For nearly a decade after the first championship, the Irish were a very good Big East team but lacked post-season success.

Beginning with the end of the 2010-11 season with sophomore Skylar Diggins (now Diggins-Smith) leading the way, Notre Dame toppled both #1 seeds Tennessee and UConn in the same tournament. The Irish reached the title game where they lost to Texas A&M but the next 8 seasons to follow brought about unprecedented success for the program:

  • A record of 279-23 good for a winning percentage of .923 for nearly a decade.
  • 8 straight ACC regular season titles and 7 straight ACC tournament championships.
  • 6 Final Fours, 6 National Championship Game Appearances (including the 2011 post-season run that started this era of success), and one more National Championship in dramatic fashion.

Muffet McGraw hangs it up with the 7th most wins all-time in women’s college basketball and 4th all-time in winning percentage for coaches who have won at least 900 games.

Making Notre Dame Cool

So much of sports is simply having great players on your side. The unique thing about college sports is that great players don’t stick around for very long. As Muffet experienced in the later stages of her career even women’s basketball started dealing with the elite prospects leaving early for the WNBA.

Yes, you need to recruit great players but you also need to build a culture of winning that maintains those pipelines to your campus. One of the things that struck me the most over the years with McGraw was how she managed to make Notre Dame cool, a feat that is extremely difficult to pull off for a small, private, Catholic school in northern Indiana.

“Win this sh*t, this is my court!”

I don’t know how to explain the chicken or egg argument all I know is some of the most charismatic, competitive, entertaining, and fierce players in college basketball were drawn to playing for Muffet McGraw. When the winning is added to the mix it’s an undeniably sense of female coolness that I hope continues for the future.

Making Geno Human

It’s clear that when we look at Muffet McGraw’s legacy she’ll always be linked to UConn head coach Geno Auriemma, for better or worse. Auriemma’s winning percentage is so ridiculously high that he enjoys an absurd amount of dominance over virtually every other coach who has taken the court against him.

Certainly in the years that followed Pat Summit’s primacy at Tennessee (Geno went 14-9 against Summit) it was McGraw who was able to fill the void as the main rival for UConn.

It didn’t always end well for Notre Dame. When the teams began facing off against each other in the Big East starting in 1996, the Huskies would win the first 11 matchups and also string together further winning streaks in the rivalry of 12 and 7 games, respectively.

Yet, some of Notre Dame’s wins were inflicted with the maximum amount of emotional damage.

2001: The Irish beat UConn for the second time on the season, this time in the Final Four on their way to the National Championship.

2011: Notre Dame prevails again in the Final Four.

2012: Another Final Four victory, this time in overtime.

2013: A thrilling win to secure the league tournament in UConn’s final Big East season. Also, the Irish won all 3 meetings this season.

2018: Yet another overtime win in the Final Four.

2019: In the last post-season meeting ever between the coaches, Notre Dame wins again in the Final Four.

Sure, Auriemma beat Muffet 38 times but the Irish coach was able to provide UConn with 21.3% of all their losses since these two programs began facing each other back in 1995-96. McGraw also finished her career going 9-9 against Auriemma stretching back to the 2011 Final Four.

Empowering Women

If you’ve paid attention over the last several seasons especially it’s been very clear that McGraw sees herself taking on a leadership role in empowering women and that this will continue after her retirement from coaching basketball.

If you listen to her comments above following her decision to retire it’s clear she had been thinking about hanging it up for a while. Things had been ‘one year at a time’ especially following the 2017-18 National Championship, she was enjoying her situation at home during the pandemic without basketball, and despite a year of struggles with a young team in 2019-20 she felt like the program was in a really good place to move on from her leadership.

However, it’s also really clear she’s extremely passionate about female leadership, creating role models for women, and that she’ll continue to be around Notre Dame and the wider community cultivating something she sees as one of her defining legacies in life. You’ll notice in the video embedded below for Muffet’s Top Ten Moments it lists Empowering Women as #2 behind her titles.

The Hand Off to Ivey

The smooth transition from McGraw to former player Niele Ivey as head coach could be an enormous legacy for the outgoing legend. That Ivey developed from the starting guard on Notre Dame’s first National Championship team to one of the most coveted coaches in the game speaks to how proud Muffet must be to hand things over to one of her own.

Hopefully, Ivey continues that legacy and the Irish remain a premier national program.

If early reports are any indication, Ivey is going to have the ball rolling sooner rather than later. On April 24th less than 48 hours after being hired she was able to secure the verbal from 5-star point guard Olivia Miles from Blair Academy in New Jersey. Miles is the No. 1 guard and No. 2 overall player in the country according to ESPN.

Ivey wasted no time over the weekend either, picking up another 5-star verbal on Sunday from Sonia Citron the No. 6 guard and No. 16 overall player from Ursuline High School in Scarsdale, New York.

Both Miles and Citron are 2021 commits and the 2020-21 season could still prove to be a challenging one for Ivey and the Irish (that sounds really good, by the way) as they look to bounce back from an 18-loss season, the most ever for a McGraw team at Notre Dame and more than the previous 6 seasons combined.

You have to feel good about the amount of faith McGraw and Jack Swarbrick had about bringing Ivey back (she was an assistant for ND from 2007 to 2019 before joining the Memphis Grizzlies this past year) without hesitation, plus Ivey’s willingness to pass up an established pipeline in the NBA to return to her alma mater. This type of hand off power, at least right now, looks absolutely perfect.