Mike Brey gave Notre Dame men’s basketball an identity, and one that re-established expectations

Notre Dame players filed into the locker room one August day in 2000, arriving to start a new chapter nobody thought would be written. Matt Doherty had the Irish on the upswing, finally, and looked like a keeper. North Carolina filched him that July, though, and halted those good vibes. Here was Mike Brey, Doherty’s replacement, needing to reset the mood and ease the apprehension that comes with a sudden summer coaching change.  

Brey’s tone-setting move was hanging a new locker room decoration front and center.

“The first thing Mike did was frame a bracket — that bracket — so those guys know that’s the goal,” then-assistant coach Rod Balanis recalled. “We want to be part of that bracket.”

Never mind that Notre Dame had spent the last 10 years out of it, usually not close to it, and had posted just two winning seasons in its first five years as a Big East member. Brey made a run for this job in 1999 and again one year later because he saw potential. It was asleep, he thought, not dead. He believed it could not only be awoken, but returned to Digger Phelps Era heights.

Brey strolled into the old Joyce Center for his introduction in July 2000, and at age 41, promised to give it 10 good years. He stayed for 23. Thirteen of them ended with NCAA Tournament appearances. There were two Elite Eights, a march right down Tobacco Road to an ACC championship, 12 seasons with a conference record at least four games above .500 and a 45-game home win streak. Notre Dame found its footing as a conference member, first in the Big East and then the ACC.

It all made Brey synonymous with a program, and a program synonymous with him.

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Every era ends, and the finish line for Brey’s is in Greensboro, N.C. — perhaps as soon as Tuesday night in the opening round of the ACC Tournament. The decision that Year 23 would be the last one came in mid-January, and it’s the necessary one. Program and coach know it. Nobody’s hiding from the reasons for the divorce.

Come Selection Sunday, Notre Dame will be excluded from that bracket for the fifth time in six years. The Irish have drifted away from that same standard Brey set back in 2000. Last year’s second-round NCAA Tournament appearance gave way to a 11-20 regular-season record with a 3-17 ACC mark.

The ending is part of Brey’s story, but not the whole book. It doesn’t erase the memories, the heights, the elevated standard. It provokes discussion of legacy. Which is what, exactly? Brey didn’t reach a Final Four. But his impact on Notre Dame men’s basketball goes beyond becoming its all-time winningest coach and hanging a few banners.

He gave it an identity.

A challenging job has a blueprint for 21st century success thanks to Brey, who was the right person for the role with the right formula to elevate its results and the attitude to stick with it. Coaches who don’t fit Notre Dame usually don’t succeed, and few fit it better than Brey.

“It’s a place that is unique in many ways,” Iowa head coach and former Notre Dame assistant Fran McCaffery said. “It’s spectacular in many ways, and the right person has to be the coach there.”

Notre Dame is not for everyone, and everyone is not for Notre Dame. Coaching basketball at Notre Dame means falling in line behind football, but still carrying an expectation to compete with college basketball’s bluest bloods. For the better part of two decades, the Irish punched above their weight class in two leagues because Brey sustained an on-court formula and off-court approach that meshed with this place as well as any could.

“The biggest thing in college athletics and athletics period is you have to have an identity,” said 2001-05 Notre Dame forward and ACC Network analyst Jordan Cornette. “When you talk about a program, you have to say, ‘Oh, that’s Purdue, this is what they do. That’s UCLA.; When you looked at Notre Dame, you knew what the identity was. Coach developed an identity that had sustainability and relevance.”

A system that fit

Pick a season on the Notre Dame KenPom page, and you’ll find the same underlying statistical profile. A low turnover rate (top-25 15 times since 2001), high assist rate (top-10 seven times) and strong 3-point shooting (top-30 in accuracy 10 times).

All told, the Irish were top-30 in adjusted offensive efficiency 16 times in Brey’s tenure, per KenPom. They spread it and shot it, early adapters of four-around-one and five-out offense. If Notre Dame couldn’t recruit with the Big East’s titans and the ACC’s best, it had to make up ground somewhere else to beat them.

“We were one of the more forward-thinking programs in how we wanted to play, the style we wanted to play and what fit the type of student-athletes we were recruiting to Notre Dame,” said Martin Ingelsby, a former Brey guard and assistant who’s now the head coach at Delaware.

The Irish might not have matched NBA talent with most teams, but they collected the right mix of talent that meshed. They wouldn’t beat themselves. They made sound decisions. Notre Dame usually had the shooters to stress defenses, a forward to complement them and guards with passing instincts. There were few ball-stoppers or possession-enders. Upperclassmen were aplenty.

“Teams can talk about sharing the ball in November and December, but can you share the ball in February and March?” Balanis said. “We did that. Guys bought into that.”

No sequence exemplified it more than Steve Vasturia’s tying 3-pointer in the 2015 ACC Championship Game against North Carolina, which capped a weekend that still stands as Brey’s most impressive achievement. The play started with Vasturia driving into the lane, collapsing the defense and kicking to one corner. Three more passes around the horn kept North Carolina scrambling. Three players passed on good shots. The result was a great shot from Vasturia in the other corner. It all looked effortless.

That was, in essence, Brey’s system, and not just in the X-and-O sense. It was a mindset. A lifestyle. The best way to teach and ingrain it was to get on the court and play. More five-on-five, less drill work. Just…play.

“Guys were excited to come to practice every day, because it was going to be a fun experience, they were going to get up and down,” Ingelsby said. “Mike was going to coach us, but have some freedom to let us play.”

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The skill in Brey’s approach was not letting freedom turn into inmates running the asylum. These were, after all, still college students. When Brey needed to zag and push a different button, he did. He banned one of Cornette’s teams from the locker room for a week of practice and let undergrad intermural teams use it as a way of re-igniting “edge and grit” during a bumpy stretch of the season.

“I don’t know how many times he kicked the team out of practice,” former Notre Dame play-by-play radio announcer Jack Nolan said. “There are a few white boards across the country that are no longer in one piece.”

Added Ingelsby: “He’s a master of navigating adversity through a season, getting a team on the same page and getting a team to believe in each other.”

Brey’s curveballs worked, though, because players knew they had a leash. They could misstep and know it wasn’t an automatic ticket to the bench at the next timeout. He was stern when necessary, but not to the point where it erased the looseness that became his team’s overarching theme. Being loose is a philosophy, yes, but it’s also a persona. Brey oozed it to the point where it was not just his trait, but the program’s.

“That’s a social skill he has outside the game, inside the game, inside the locker room,” Cornette said. “Just in life, he’s a relationship guy. He’s good at getting people to disarm and engage.”

Embracing his place

Coaching basketball at a football school is a daily lesson in humility, at least for those who want to avoid rankling their bosses. Brey, though, had enough reason to raise a fuss. He inherited a dated, drab arena. The team’s weight room was on the other side of the old Joyce Center from its locker room. It practiced in “The Pit”, a non-exclusive facility buried below the arena.

“We had what we had, man, and we had to make it work,” Balanis said.

All the while, Brey kept rolling. Kept winning. Kept his mouth shut publicly. Even turned less-than-ideal circumstances into positives. Can’t get every recruit into school? Find the ones you can get and really invest in them. Football consumes the oxygen? Feed off its energy and host recruiting weekends on game days. Practice in a dingy basement? Get everybody there for some undistracted hard work.

“The Pit was isolated,” Nolan said. “It was like Las Vegas. What happened in The Pit stayed in The Pit. You could go down there, get the team and staff together and work really hard together.”

Notre Dame has a fresh arena and a sparkling four-year-old practice facility now, two statements that it wants to aim high in basketball. Its Brey-era success showed it could, even if hoops is not the bus driver. The changing tides of modern college basketball are a new wrinkle, and one that Brey didn’t navigate as successfully as required these days. But if whoever replaces him tackles it with the forward-thinking approach that fueled Brey’s best days, Notre Dame can regain its footing.

“They need someone who’s going to rebrand it again,” Cornette said, “is innovative in their own approach, who’s going to be progressive in this ecosystem that’s ever-changing.”

A new identity, you might say.

What that identity becomes is less important than its mere existence, but the model of hard-to-guard, veteran teams that share the ball fits the program even in the age of NIL and the transfer portal. Maybe it lives on past the Brey era. Maybe not. What’s clear now is the expectations of being in the bracket and advancing in it that Brey restored will transcend his tenure.

May as well frame them for all in the locker room to see.