Bidding Brey Goodbye

The second time I set foot on Notre Dame’s campus, I was nine years old. It was a gray South Bend Sunday, like so many in my future, and my dad was taking us to watch Notre Dame play UConn.

UConn was good that year. Eventual national champion good. They had Charlie Villanueva. They had Ben Gordon. They had Emeka Okafor.

Notre Dame beat them.

I’d swung into Notre Dame fandom that fall, pivoting away from Illinois in that grade school phase where you figure out your favorite teams by deciding arbitrarily that a new team is your favorite until one sticks. We’d been to South Bend for my cousin’s wedding a few years prior, and I tell people that’s when I became a fan, but that wasn’t really it. Really, I just had an afternoon heading into fourth grade when I decided I wanted to have a favorite college, like how my brothers were Kansas and UNC fans. I chose Notre Dame. Without much reason.

Becoming a Notre Dame fan meant that for Christmas, my parents gifted me a Notre Dame hooded sweatshirt and a Notre Dame stocking hat, both of which sat on my person as we cruised the Indiana toll road. I was cocky. A dad at church—a known Purdue fan who gave me what was, in hindsight, a very overstated impression of that particular rivalry—heard we were going and told me the Irish had no chance. I didn’t know if they did or didn’t, but I hit him with something that felt like a comeback, and when the family stopped at the McDonald’s at the last travel plaza before Exit 77, I ordered a large Sprite. Because Mom had stayed home, and because I was feeling myself.

We sat in the upper bowl of the JACC, on the bleachers, pre-renovation, and we roiled and rocked as Notre Dame gave the Huskies everything they could handle, Jordan Cornette blocking shots and Torrian Jones grabbing rebounds and Chris Thomas scoring 31, playing every minute, and sealing it with a fast-break finger roll at the end. There’s a great picture on und.com of the stormed court, crowd covering more than half of it. You can see ‘BIG EAST’ in the paint on the unstormed lane. You can see the three-point line still hugging the top of the key. Our seats aren’t in the field of vision, but if you were to pause time right at that moment and spin the camera to the right, you’d see a breathless nine-year-old in the bleachers, face flushed and hat-hair sticking every which way. Heart full. Heart falling in love with Notre Dame.

The JACC’s a lot nicer now.

But I miss those bleachers.

I was always more a Notre Dame basketball fan than a Notre Dame football fan. This started out of practicality. I wasn’t actually at the school, nor did I interact regularly with anyone who went there. I was a kid in northern Illinois who played sports on Saturdays and played outside when he didn’t have games himself. I didn’t watch too much college football. Notre Dame changed this—the 2005 season, Charlie Weis’s first, is the first time I remember college football being appointment television—but I was more a fan of basketball. I played basketball. Basketball games were shorter, and more frequent. Basketball games did not happen during times when I wanted to play outside. I didn’t fully know what was going on—when that 2004 Notre Dame team missed the NCAA Tournament field (a major piece of foreshadowing in my life story), I convinced myself the Irish had been jobbed and that Seton Hall, for some reason, was the team Notre Dame should have been in ahead of, even though the Pirates were more deserving than a dozen other tournament teams and also clearly better than Notre Dame—but that would come later. I would learn college basketball through the lens of Notre Dame. I would learn college basketball through the lens of Mike Brey.

Mike Brey is not the best basketball coach in the country, as Pat Connaughton once famously (famously to me) said he was. In his 23 years at the helm, the Irish finished as a top-16 team by KenPom exactly twice. Brey never made a Final Four in South Bend, nor did he ever craft a team good enough to be expected to make one. The 2011 team garnered a 2-seed by pivoting to an offense called “The Burn” in which Ben Hansbrough would stand at the center circle until the shot clock hit 10, then try to take his defender one-on-one and kick it out to Tim Abromaitis if he didn’t get to the rim himself. This was effective, but it never felt like it should work, even if it knocked off Pitt in front of the Oakland Zoo and led the Irish to an 11–1 finish in Big East play (for the college basketball nerds around, the Pitt game was a 49-possession affair). The 2015 team was the best Notre Dame team since at least 1978, but it played in the year of Towns, and of Kaminsky, and of another Okafor—this time, Jahlil—and it did not play a whole lot of defense, electric as that made it.

The 2015 team is the perfect example of what Mike Brey could do well. It entered the year with few realistic tournament expectations, coming off a 15–17 campaign that was far and away the worst Brey turned in before the doomful Laszewski era. Jerian Grant was returning from an academic suspension, but while we knew he was good (people remember the five overtimes, but they forget how Grant went Reggie Miller on Louisville’s ass at the end of regulation in 2013, scoring 12 points in 28 seconds), we didn’t know what he could be. Pat Connaughton was a baseball player. Demetrius Jackson was a once talked-of one-and-done playing his second college season. Zach Auguste was a specimen with a headcase reputation. Steve Vasturia was a sophomore shooter who hadn’t shot all that well the year prior. Bonzie Colson was an octopus learning to play basketball. V.J. Beachem, bless his heart, was up there with Jackson in terms of recruiting status, but he was the least useful man in the rotation. This was Brey’s element.

The thing Mike Brey did spectacularly, the thing Brey has always done spectacularly, was to foster development in guys who needed space to develop. Connaughton. Colson. Grant. Abromaitis. Auguste. Matt Farrell. Hansbrough. Luke Harangody, in his early form. Kyle McAlarney. Russell Carter. While Luke Zeller and V.J. Beachem and Laszewski didn’t thrive under Brey, the guys who did thrive (Jack Cooley, my brain yells) made it look like Brey’d done a magic trick. Grant was one of the ten most prolific offensive players in the country that 2015 season. Auguste was somehow the second half of his one-two punch. Vasturia became maybe the best on-ball defender Mike Brey ever coached. Jackson thrived in supporting roles. Pat Connaughton used every ounce of his unnerving athletic gifts, in no way reined in by his head coach. Players were never reined in under Brey. They were always set free. Sometimes, this was a curse—a low point in my seventh grade experience came on a February night at Allstate Arena, Brey in his don’t–draw–up–out–of–bounds–plays–era (or so it seemed), the Irish falling to DePaul as Rob Kurz hucked a contested three with four seconds left, the evident objective only being to get a chance at a putback—but when it worked, it made for the most fun version of college basketball success imaginable. Anthony Davis was a great college basketball player. Tim Abromaitis was a great college basketball story.

It didn’t hurt that off the court, Brey was congenial and affable and tellingly humble. He knew his place on campus, and he never tried to be more than that place, and he made it clear that this was intentional. He might not have been great in ends of games for his first eight years at the helm, but he was not a doofus. He was cunning. He was creative. He knew what he was doing. He knows it still, and has known it still, accepting the retirement treatment with Notre Dame when he is in no way retiring, and never really indicated that he was. His annual exhortations to players to test the NBA Draft waters have become an eternal lesson in leadership, the embodiment of the idea that an organization is its best when every individual’s personal good aligns with the organization’s overall good, so that all parties can work frictionlessly towards both those things. There are whispers of a scandal, a long time ago now, but they come from the orneriest among the Notre Dame world, the sort who enjoy grumpy contrarianism. Perhaps they have merit. I’m not trying to say they’re wrong. I never knew the details of the rumor. But aside from Grant’s academic misconduct, the biggest public black mark on Notre Dame’s men’s basketball ledger all these years was McAlarney getting nabbed for pot back when pot was a thing for which you could get nabbed.

Oddly, it’s my non-college years in which Brey’s teams have meant the most. Brey beat Duke five times while I was in school, yet I remember more fondly watching as a kid when Tom Crean chased Russell Carter down the sideline following a loose ball scrum. It’s a shame, of course, that Notre Dame’s best basketball moments in my lifetime mostly came when I was struggling so much I couldn’t get myself to the JACC, but basketball’s a game of luck, like life, and it’s especially a game of luck when you shoot a lot of threes. I was at CJ’s for the end of the Butler game in 2015 when Connaughton blocked Kellen Dunham’s shot. I was there at CJ’s, watching on TV. I celebrated. It was enough.

Those other years, though. God, those other years. The memories.

2005, the Big East Tournament loss to Rutgers dooming a promising season. Numerous tantrums after bad losses.

2006, the snakebit team to end all snakebitten teams, losing five in a row by one possession at one point and losing to Georgetown by four in the Big East Tourney to cap it off, me watching the gamecast in my sixth grade Computers class. Me, telling people that close wins and losses came down to coaching, which may have been my first “take.” Me, feeling personally bad for Chris Quinn, and replaying the endings of games in the driveway (and on the Little Tykes hoop in the basement, for which I was too big).

2007, the Russell Carter year, my oldest brother’s first year on campus, Harangody blooming in that Alabama upset during the blizzard and my brother calling from the student section before games to impress a girl with his brotherly kindness. He and his friends—including Kurz’s cousin, who helped get me a ball signed by the whole roster—coming to Crystal Lake at the start of spring break, us watching the Georgetown loss at the old house together. Me, faking sick the day of the Winthrop game so I could go home early and watch on TV with him.

2008, when Harangody broke through and McAlarney came back from the pot thing to shoot the lights out of the whole place, finally (to me) getting that first round win before Derrick Low and Aron Baynes waylaid us in Denver.

2009, McAlarney’s range. Maui. The beginning of Harangody trying to do too much (another curse of Brey’s limitlessness).

2010, Abromaitis’s breakout. The origins, I believe, of The Burn. Carleton Scott’s shot to beat Marquette. Again, watching a gamecast, this time on my mom’s iPhone in the hills of southern Indiana, Notre Dame surging past Georgetown and us strangely unable to find the game on the radio.

2011, my junior year of high school and my next brother’s sophomore year in South Bend, the one where he got into the swing of things and the Irish did too, and now it was his turn to keep me posted with the inside talk from campus.

2012, going to stay with my brother for the Syracuse game, Scott Martin on his feet and Fab Melo suspended and Jim Boeheim undefeated no more. The hot tub team? Was this the beginning of the hot tubs?

2013, in the second row for those five overtimes against Louisville. Hugging Eric Atkins’s back at center court.

2016, watching the Stephen F. Austin finish on the screens at the Las Vegas airport, having listened to Jack Nolan call the win over Michigan on my way to O’Hare two nights before.

2017, living in Minneapolis, Colson completing his Harangody transformation and Matt Farrell sticking his tongue out every chance he got.

2018, all the injuries. So many injuries. The Virginia Tech comeback. The forlorn looks during the Penn State loss in the NIT. The end of the era.

There was, of course, the encore last year, and thank God for that. Thank God for Paul Atkinson, the lunchpail presence this class has never otherwise had. With another Paul Atkinson this year, maybe things could have been different, but different they aren’t. Things are what they are, and Notre Dame is bad, and Notre Dame has been bad, and when a coach’s team is bad and has been bad, it’s time for that coach to go.

Of course, it isn’t about Brey tonight for me. Of course, it is as well, it is very much about Mike Brey, God bless that man from here to eternity. But it’s not about Brey tonight. This is about losing a companion, and about a thing changing, and about this entity which had always been there from my first basketball-conscious moments no longer being there. I hope we hire Shrewsberry. I think the teams would play well under Shrewsberry. I think the teams would be fun under Shrewsberry, and the ceiling could be high under Shrewsberry. I do not want to have to answer for Fran McCaffery’s antics. But no matter who the next coach is, Notre Dame men’s basketball will never be the same as it was. That’s how time works. It ends things. It kills things. It wins. It dries up oceans, and it crumbles mountains into dust, and it burns out suns. And it takes Mike Brey away from South Bend.

Notre Dame’s gotten a lot shinier over Mike Brey’s 23 years. You can see it in that picture of the old JACC. Notre Dame’s gotten richer, and it’s gotten smarter, and it’s gotten preppier. Less Joliet. More Winnetka. Less Staten Island. More Hamptons. Fewer students were multi-sport athletes in high school. More did things for the sake of college applications. Fewer students love South Bend, and are willing to live in its dumps. More want an apartment with sparkling bathrooms and windows that’ll lock. This is the way of the world, it’s the natural way of the world, it’s a supply in response to a demand, and more than half of it is a very good thing. I do not begrudge locking windows. But I miss things, too, and I’m disappointed by people, too, and I’m starting to cry now, sitting here at midnight in Texas, alone at my desk, because a big piece of Notre Dame’s soul is leaving, possibly as soon as tonight, and it is a piece of the soul that I love.

The JACC’s a lot nicer now.

But I miss those bleachers.