How Notre Dame remained productive amid a stress-filled weekend awaiting NCAA Tournament fate

The way Notre Dame talked about this day for the past year, it created visions of the party of the decade.

You see it every year during the NCAA Tournament selection show — teams erupting at their watch parties when Greg Gumbel calls their name. Raw emotion. Pure joy. Especially those who don’t earn this chance often or hadn’t in a few years.

Notre Dame hasn’t appeared in the bracket since 2017. It watched the show last year at coach Mike Brey’s house knowing exclusion was inevitable, not out of masochism, but motivation. A year from now, the Irish thought back then, they’d sit in this same spot with a different reaction. They wanted to be that team that loses its mind in elation.

Sure enough, Notre Dame (22-10, 15-5 ACC) made the NCAA Tournament and drew a First Four matchup with Rutgers (18-13, 12-8 Big Ten) on Wednesday (9:10 p.m. ET, TruTV) in Dayton, Ohio. The Irish gathered at Brey’s to watch and needed just three minutes to learn their assignment.

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The reaction?

“We didn’t jump up here,” Brey said. “We just kind of clapped. We were relieved to see it.”

Well, that was decidedly not what they imagined in the offseason. Or after beating Kentucky in December. Or even a month ago, when they were chasing an ACC regular-season title. A team tracking toward a single-digit seed as recently as March 1 endured a claustrophobic three days of wondering, waiting and, yes, a little worrying.

“I think everybody was a little tight,” Brey said.

His players can confirm.

“There were some nerves going into it knowing our positioning,” senior forward Nate Laszewski said.

Added senior guard Prentiss Hubb: “I was a little worried.”

Yet Notre Dame heads to Dayton feeling re-energized and upbeat, even after a white-knuckler of a Selection Sunday and a wire-to-wire loss to Virginia Tech in its first ACC Tournament game. Brey’s job was to make sure of it. He pushed a button Saturday and Sunday during practice he had hit only twice before all season: during a midweek practice before the Dec. 11 game vs. Kentucky and the day after an escape at Howard.

Tough love.

“Saturday, we watched our 10 turnovers in the first half,” Brey said. “That’s very unlike us. We’ve been very good with the ball all year. Then [we watched] guys driving by us. It was hard to watch. It was raw. It was challenging by me to our group.”

Message received.

“It was the truth,” graduate student forward Paul Atkinson Jr. said. “It hurts, but it was what we needed to hear.”

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Atkinson should understand what works and doesn’t work this time of year. He’s the only player on the roster with prior NCAA Tournament experience, which came in 2019 at Yale. Brey, of course, is not new to this either. This is his 13th tournament appearance in 22 seasons at Notre Dame. He has coached teams that cruised into the tournament and others that backed into it.

One malady that needed addressing, though, was identifiable with even a less trained eye. The defense Notre Dame touted about overhauling this summer and relied on for much of its strong January sprung a leak. Virginia Tech hung 87 points on it in the ACC Tournament. Per KenPom, it was the most efficient offensive game anyone played against the Irish all season.

Things weren’t trending upward either. A 74-70 March 2 loss at Florida State contained too many defensive lapses. The Irish gave up 79 points in a Feb. 19 loss at Wake Forest. They needed to pull the wheel, or they’d go one-and-done in March Madness too.

“We were locked in, digging in on the defensive end,” Hubb said.

Rigorous practices were a helpful distraction from the discussion Notre Dame might not make the field, which amplified over the weekend as it dropped out of more and more projected brackets and Richmond stole a bid by Sunday afternoon by winning the Atlantic 10 Tournament. In the end, the Irish were the last at-large team selected.

The antsy lead-in may have subdued the celebration, but not the hunger. Notre Dame closed the loop on its one-year journey back into the field, but it wants to keep writing the feel-good script deep into March.

“Even though it’s a play-in game, all you need is one opportunity to make a big difference,” Hubb said.

Brey has fed his players examples of it. Just last year, UCLA went First Four to Final Four as a No. 11 seed. VCU did the same in 2011. In 10 tournaments since the First Four was implemented, a team in it has advanced to at least the round of 32 in all but one.

A whole lot easier said than done, though. But nothing about this rebound from 11-15 afterthought to tournament team was a breeze either.

“It was going to be a hard path, as this one is,” Brey said. “It was hard to get to Dayton. It’s harder to move forward. This group has responded a lot. I’ve never been prouder of a group to chase something for a year. It was very clear what we wanted to do.”