Mike Brey to step down as Notre Dame men’s basketball head coach at end of season

Notre Dame men’s basketball will end an era after this year. The Mike Brey era.

Brey, the 23-year Irish men’s basketball coach, will “step away” after the 2022-23 season, the school announced Thursday. The news was first reported by the South Bend Tribune‘s Tom Noie. Brey has held the job since 2000 and is the program’s winningest coach.

“It has been a great run for me and our program over the past two decades, but it is time for a new voice to lead this group into the future,” Brey said in a statement. “I want to thank our student-athletes, assistant coaches and support staff who have played such a key role in the culture we have created.”

Brey, 63, is 481-268 in his Notre Dame career. The Irish have reached the NCAA tournament 13 times in his tenure, including two Elite Eight appearances. They won the ACC tournament in 2015.

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This season, though, is on track to be the fifth without a March Madness appearance in the last six years. Notre Dame is 9-10 and 1-7 in the ACC, with its most recent game an 84-71 home loss to Florida State Tuesday. After it, Brey admitted he was out of answers to stop a spiraling season.

“I certainly haven’t been able to help them much,” Brey said Tuesday. “I told them that. I’ve done a horrible job with you, fellas.”

The rest of his Notre Dame tenure, though, was largely the opposite of horrible.

Notre Dame hired Brey in the summer of 2000, pulling him away from Delaware after five years as the Blue Hens’ head coach. Prior to Delaware, he spent eight seasons as a Duke assistant under Mike Krzyzewski.

The Irish, without an NCAA tournament appearance in 10 seasons, reached it in Brey’s first year and the two after that. After a three-year drought from 2003-06, they made the tournament in six of the next seven years. The peak came with consecutive Elite Eight runs in 2015 and 2016. The Irish lost 68-66 to then-undefeated Kentucky in the 2015 Elite Eight on a pair of tiebreaking free throws with six seconds left.

A four-year streak without a March Madness bid ended last season, when Notre Dame went 24-11, 15-5 in the ACC and reached the Round of 32. The No. 11 seed Irish beat Rutgers in the First Four and Alabama in the first round. The 2022-23 team returned the fifth-year trio of Dane Goodwin, Nate Laszewski and Cormac Ryan – who Brey called the “Big 3” – in addition to fifth-year guard Trey Wertz. They added five-star freshman JJ Starling and grad transfer Marcus Hammond.

Goals were lofty entering this year. Win the ACC. Second weekend of the tournament, or beyond. Brey envisioned coaching at Notre Dame for several more years too, he said before the season. He also revealed in an October press conference he had begun to have discussions with Notre Dame director of athletics Jack Swarbrick and deputy athletics director Jim Fraleigh about extending his contract, which runs through the 2024-25 season.

Those grand visions or several more years on the job did not materialize. Notre Dame is 2-8 in its last 10 games and has dropped more than 100 spots in the KenPom rankings since the start of the season. The Irish are tracking toward a fourth losing record ACC play in the last six years. The topic of a change became more frequently discussed as the tournament-less seasons mounted. The time for it has now arrived.

“Mike and I have talked often in recent years about a future transition in the program’s leadership and during our most recent conversation we reached the mutual conclusion that the end of this season represented the right time,” Swarbrick said in a statement.

“That Mike is the winningest coach in the 119-year history of Notre Dame men’s basketball speaks to his skill as a teacher of the game. His even greater legacy, however, lies in his achievements as an educator and mentor of the young men who played for him. In that sense, he represents this University as well as any coach I have worked with during my time at Notre Dame. And for that reason, I look forward to working with Mike to define his future role within Notre Dame Athletics.”

Notre Dame’s next game is Saturday vs. Boston College. The Irish’s final home game of the year is March 1 vs. Pittsburgh.

Brey and Notre Dame will hold a press conference Friday at 11 a.m. ET.