How much can Notre Dame be modernized? Micah Shrewsberry will find out (2024)

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — The supersized golf cart is parked around the corner from the entrance to Legends, the campus restaurant and pub at Notre Dame. There’s a yellow film of pollen on the hood and traces of it on the second and third rows of seats. And this, Micah Shrewsberry explains, is why he was a little late for lunch. Staffers brought the cart around for him and an emergency wipedown ensued, because he was allergic to pretty much everything on it.

“You guys know I’m going to die, right?” he told them with a laugh.

Yes, they’re still learning the new men’s basketball coach here in late May, two months after he replaced a guy who’d been on the job for two decades. Short of inducing anaphylactic shock, this shouldn’t be too problematic.

The new coach learning the place, however, is a different and far more consequential endeavor. Before Shrewsberry arrived, the depth of his familiarity with Notre Dame was watching football games from the stands as a fan. It’s something, but it doesn’t get a basketball coach very far at a school bolted to its idiosyncrasies, where it’s as important to meet with the faculty board as it is to glad-hand boosters or scour gyms at grassroots events. Stuff that’s easy to learn and, as anyone who works here finds out, much trickier to get.

Such is Shrewsberry’s challenge of modernizing Notre Dame men’s basketball, for want of a more nuanced way to put it. Transfer portal raids for quick fixes year-to-year? Not happening, ever. Dangling a shipping container of NIL money in front of a prospect? Probably not happening, either, or at least certainly not in such unsubtly transactional ways. Shrewsberry effectively has the same general plan as the last guy — it’s not a conversation with a Notre Dame basketball coach unless the phrase “get old and stay old” pops up, as it does mid-meal at Legends — but he has to do it better, all while working out of a different toolbox than his peers. Not the lightest lift.

Shrewsberry at least has a concept of it: mostly rolled-up sleeves that kind of hew to the unmovable guardrails of the place, with some front-end proactiveness and innovation to nudge everything into the present moment. “I realize where I am,” Shrewsberry says. “The University of Notre Dame is going to exist whether we have a basketball program or not. I realize that, I recognize that. Maybe I fit here because I know I’m just coaching basketball and I’m not trying to change the world. I’m a rule follower. They tell us, ‘We need to do it this way,’ we’re going to do that way. Here’s your lane. I’m good at staying in my lane.”

new faces ☘️#GoIrish pic.twitter.com/r9CHUCOfBk

— Notre Dame Men’s Basketball (@NDmbb) May 22, 2023

See Also

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As Shrewsberry works through his lunch, he has 10 players on his roster. Three of them have played college basketball in a Notre Dame uniform. None of them are on campus; summer workouts don’t start for another couple of weeks. All of which is to say anything and everything Shrewsberry discusses is totally hypothetical. Silhouettes and sketches. No proof available, one way or another, near the end of May 2023.

So what’s the plan, when there is actual work to be done? It should become quickly apparent in June that individual skill development will be the fulcrum of Irish men’s basketball moving forward, a rather nostalgic idea that won’t rattle any cages in any corner of the Notre Dame universe. It is possible, as Shrewsberry tells it anyway, that there won’t be many if any, according-to-Hoyle practices during any summer that he’s in charge; everything will be about having hands on a player and enhancing his skill set with very small student-to-teacher ratios. “We do a lot of one-on-one stuff,” Shrewsberry says. “We really teach a lot of concepts. Things that are going to help you be successful in college and when you leave and go play professional basketball. I say it all the time: I don’t want to teach you plays, I want to teach you how to play. We go about it a different way. We’re not practicing. We’re not taking those four hours and breaking it down and doing two practices a week. Can’t teach you that stuff. I went to the (NBA Draft) Combine — I saw a lot of people in there struggling. Looked like they didn’t know how to play basketball. Let’s teach them some of those things in the summer.”

Notre Dame certainly needs a jolt there at a granular level, after recent veteran-laden rosters stagnated year-to-year. It’s also a something-old, something-new approach, though, in that it’s grounded in a very NBA-like view of how a basketball program should be run — which may be appealing to prospects who have some designs on reaching that level. Shrewsberry goes back to falls spent working with Gordon Hayward at Butler, just the two of them in the gym — “He’s getting personal attention, and I think that really helped,” Shrewsberry says — and then fast-forwards to his time as an assistant with the Boston Celtics.

“Jaylen (Brown) and I were doing one-on-one workouts,” he says. “(Jayson) Tatum and I were doing one-on-one workouts. We spend a lot of time doing that stuff, and maybe it hurts us at the start of the year or something, we’re not as prepared to play somebody. They’re talking about playing games at the end of the summer here in a couple of years — like, we’re probably going to suck. But it ain’t going on anybody’s resume. We’ll be all right. If you feel like as a player that we’re investing in you, like we’re putting in all resources to make you a better player, you’re probably more likely to stay than leave.”

While likely the core reason Notre Dame homed in on Shrewsberry as a candidate, getting dudes better in June and July is no revolutionary twist. This is the part everyone does that Notre Dame can do, too. The stuff most everyone does that Notre Dame can’t or won’t do — that’s where Shrewsberry and his staff have to create angles, to put the program in the best position to compete. That’s where Shrewsberry has to carve a lane amenable to everyone.

Like, say, transfers. That Shrewsberry’s very first roster will feature at least two undergraduate transfers — Julian Roper II (Northwestern) and Kebba Njie (Penn State) –— to rest the idea that the Irish can never go that route. It still won’t be the wellspring it is for dang near everyone else. At the risk of oversimplifying a process with a lot of gradation to it: Notre Dame’s admissions department will thoroughly examine course syllabi for any potential transfer to determine how many credits he’ll bring along, and if the carryover doesn’t put a player on a feasible track to a degree, it’s a no-go.

On the occasions Shrewsberry will want to entertain a transfer, then, the critical piece is homework done on the front end. Some college basketball programs have created non-coaching, general manager-esque positions to monitor spaces like player movement and NIL; Shrewsberry had director of recruiting Brian Snow in place to address the former at Penn State, and Snow will do the same work at Notre Dame. Early identification of targets and early homework on their academics won’t make the process easy, but it will push it somewhere past prohibitive.

“You gotta know where you can attack it,” Shrewsberry says. “The timing of being able to get a transfer accepted, versus the timing of how quickly people are making decisions, doesn’t match up — with some of the higher academic schools, that’s where you get the mishaps. But now we know — we’re recruiting this kid, he’s serious about coming here, get us your syllabus, let’s do it all ahead of time, let’s speed this process up as much as possible. But there’s nobody over in admissions sitting there with a gavel and we have a transfer and it’s like ‘No!’ and then they turn and walk out the door. Like I said, give me some parameters. I’m good at staying in parameters.”

While Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick has been a proponent of name, image and likeness benefits as sort of originally intended — a player providing a service or value of some kind and being remunerated for it — the warped pay-for-play version currently at work in college athletics is not likely a path the school can stomach. How Notre Dame proceeds with NIL, as an athletic department and as an institution, is almost assuredly out of Shrewsberry’s purview.

It might be more of a drag on liftoff than any coach would prefer, but Shrewsberry is at least sanguine about having a program with something worthwhile to offer prospects in that space. “I think they’re in the transition process,” he says. “Adjusting and making changes and trying to get on the same page with our athletic department, in the same boat and going in the same direction. I’ve actually been encouraged by that piece of it, and where we’re going and what we’re doing and the plan for everything.”

Whatever shape any of this takes, it will not do so with haste. Micah Shrewsberry and his new basketball program are asking for some patience. “I can’t do a quick fix,” the head coach says, and he never was going to be able to. The school’s famously torturous checks and rechecks of potential hires had Shrewsberry joking with his assistants that it was harder for them to get jobs there than it was for him. These days, when people ask Shrewsberry how he wants to do things, he often enough volleys the query back and asks how things have always been done. Maybe, he says, it’s because it’s actually a good way to do it. Or maybe it’s because he wants to check the side mirrors for those lane lines, too.

Notre Dame, after all, brooks no revolution. There’s only so much Shrewsberry can do that’s different.

But then “different” is the whole idea behind moving on from the winningest coach in program history, isn’t it? There has to be at least a little give from Notre Dame, the tiniest lurch forward, if Notre Dame wants its new coach to give the program what it needs. And the new coach at least appears to have a keen eye for the proper way to do “different” around here, and to want to do the hard work of putting fresh aerodynamics on a thing that’s been grounded.

“I’m the head coach at the University of Notre Dame, and that’s really cool for me,” Shrewsberry says. “Yeah, it’s tough. Right now, it’s really tough. There’s days it’s like, why am I doing this? Why did I take on this kind of challenge and rebuild? It’s probably just because I’m destined to be here, is why I’m doing it. I know this is telling me I don’t want to do it again. Not anytime soon.”

(Top photo: Matt Cashore / USA Today)

Brian Hamilton joined The Athletic as a senior writer after three-plus years as a national college reporter for Sports Illustrated. Previously, he spent eight years at the Chicago Tribune, covering everything from Notre Dame to the Stanley Cup Final to the Olympics. Follow Brian on Twitter @_Brian_Hamilton