Notre Dame did manage to get Paul Mulcahy to visit, but the Rutgers transfer chose Washington over South Bend, and with that, it appears the Irish’s 2023–24 roster is set. There will be ten scholarship players. None will be in their final year of collegiate eligibility. Four will be true freshmen.
It’s a roster that Bart Torvik, our current best objective measure, ranks 222nd out of Division I’s 361 programs, right in between North Dakota and Quinnipiac (that ND vs. ND battle for 221st should be electric). It’s a roster that Bart Torvik ranks last in the still–pretty–weak ACC.
Is Bart Torvik right?
You can talk yourself into things. You can say that perhaps Torvik’s algorithm takes a harsher view on Notre Dame’s returning talent than is warranted because data on J.R. Konieczny is so scarce. You can say that Notre Dame might begin the year facing the kinds of spreads 222nd-ranked teams face, but that with their youth, they’ll improve as the season goes on—that this ranking is only a starting point. You can point to Micah Shrewsberry’s first year at Penn State, in which he managed a 14–17 final record despite playing in the Big Ten. That 2022 Penn State team was a different animal than this Notre Dame team in terms of returning production, though, and Konieczny is just one man, a man on whom data is scarce in part because he redshirted for one of the worst teams in power conference basketball. I’m not trying to dissuade you from hoping, but the situation’s a little bleak. The argument which makes the most sense is that this team should get better as the year goes on.
Helping matters is the schedule, where four other ACC teams check in on Torvik at 100th or worse and only two or three are comfortably in NCAA Tournament territory. Helping matters also is the degree of uncertainty accompanying these sorts of projections and this inexperienced roster in particular, though that’s a double-edged sword if the magnitude of the potential downside is comparable to that of the upside. Helping matters the most is that this season doesn’t matter all that much in and of itself. Notre Dame has its guy in Shrewsberry, and there’s no reason to believe he won’t be able to make this a competitive basketball program in a few years. If it takes a rough entry period to get there, so be it—the cupboard was very dry. It’s easier to be patient if the promise is high, and the promise is high right now in South Bend.
If it’s a rebuild we need, it’s a rebuild we’ll accept.
Quick(er) Hitters
Here’s what’s gone down since we last did one of these:
- Matt Norlander published an in-depth account of Notre Dame’s coaching transition from Mike Brey to Shrewsberry. It’s an interesting read, I’d recommend it, a few things that didn’t get as much attention in reactions to it as I think they deserved: Jack Swarbrick says he told Mike Brey he could coach as long as Swarbrick was AD. There were three moonshot candidates who all immediately said no. Niele Ivey was among those consulted, because Shrewsberry was still on staff at Purdue when Jaden Ivey played there. There are other important bits in there, but they’ve gotten reaction (Penn State, what did you do, you should have simply bought that woman’s house), so again: Enjoy reading it for yourself. It’s cool. Maybe put on some Guster while you read it to get the full Norlander experience.
- Georgetown will come to the Joyce Center this winter, with Notre Dame playing in D.C. in the 2024–25 season. This is exhilarating for those of us raised in the Russell Carter era, and for this year, it should be a good look: Two teams whose names are better than their on-court products.
- South Carolina is the ACC/SEC Challenge opponent. Not a bad draw there, either. I don’t think strength of schedule is a concern at all. We will gladly accept an embarrassing SOS number if the win–loss record ends up respectable.
- The football program has added Brauntae Johnson (4-star athlete) and Taebron Bennie-Powell (3-star athlete), but Isiah Canion (4-star wide receiver) flipped to Georgia Tech and Justin Scott (5-star defensive tackle) chose Ohio State over Notre Dame. Missing Scott hurts. St. Ignatius–Chicago guy. The class is at 9th nationally, but only 12th in average recruit rating, which bodes poorly for its ability to hold onto a top-ten spot, let alone rise.
- Both Jordan Cornette and LaPhonso Ellis were caught up in the ESPN layoffs around the end of June.
- We outlasted Pat Fitzgerald and quite possibly will never have to worry about Northwestern embarrassing us again. Fitzgerald, however, will probably pop up somewhere else in a year or two.
- We also outlasted Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Stanford’s president who announced today he’ll resign and retract at least three papers after the Stanford Daily revealed he’d engaged in data manipulation. He’s a neuroscientist by trade. Don’t undersell what a big deal this could be for college sports: Stanford is a sleeping giant in the Pac-12 realignment situation.
Apologies for the unannounced absence this last month. We did not expect to miss this many weeks, but we do have a tendency to let up during the offseason. We should be back on our Monday schedule again from here through the foreseeable future.
