Hold your nose and close your eyes
Alright, let’s get this over with.
The 2024-25 Notre Dame men’s basketball season has been an unmitigated disaster. Period. Full stop. End of discussion. A team that, last season, finished seven games below .500 gave far much more cause for hope than this team, which, despite returning virtually every key contributor from the prior season and added a decent recruiting class and handful of transfer portal players, finished the regular season three wins under .500.
The issue, in short, is that head coach Micah Shrewsberry made a mistake. Last year, his inaugural season in South Bend involved laying the groundwork for a program built on defense and toughness. Then, this past offseason, Shrewsberry focused almost exclusively on improving the team’s offensive capabilities. It led to the team going from 64.0 points per game to 73.7 but also allowed opponent points per game to increase from 67.2 to 73.0.
Last season, it wasn’t pretty to watch then-freshman Markus Burton shouldered with generating essentially all of the team’s offense, but it was a somewhat-refreshing shift from the soft offense and defensive sieve that Mike Brey’s program had become. And Shrewsberry’s hard-nosed approach felt like a program identity with staying power when coupled with enhanced recruiting from high school and the portal. Instead, it’s essentially two steps forward and two steps back over both of his seasons in South Bend
After finishing the 2023–24 season 328th out of 362 nationally in offensive rating (i.e., points per 100 possessions) and 139th in defensive rating, this year’s Irish conclude the regular season 128th and 282nd in those metrics, respectively. It’s not exactly a zero-sum trade-off, but it’s close enough to one.
Improved regular season record from last year? Sure, but only from 12-19 to 14-17. Improved recruiting? Markedly so, with the 2024 freshman class ranked 28th nationally in the 247SportsComposite and the upcoming crop ranked 5th overall. But freshmen aren’t enough to win in an era where older, experienced and physically developed guys stay in college rather than jumping to the pros. So, next season’s impressive recruiting haul almost assuredly won’t produce the kind of results Shrewsberry needs after a dreadful two-year start, at least not without massive NIL investment to bring in multiple portal splashes or convince this year’s best players to return.
And, on that note, the lone bright spots this season have been Burton and Tae Davis. Burton led the ACC in points per game at 22.2 and earned Second-Team All-ACC Honors — and if you have a problem with him not being on the First-Team, players on bad teams don’t get that recognition unless they’re high-level NBA Draft players or the conference lacks is very weak. And Davis, for his part, has turned himself into a quasi-reliable scorer by developing his jump shot. But who would blame the team’s two best contributors for not wanting to play Sisyphus pushing the offensive boulder up this hill for a third straight season?
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Matt Cashore-Imagn Images
And in terms of improving fan engagement from the malaise at the end of Brey’s tenure? That was always a losing proposition for a school where football’s gravitational pull is orders of magnitude greater than any other sport. But even with that in mind, having your head coach go on his fourth tirade/meltdown in a two-year span after a 15-point home loss to Louisville and directing his anger toward the fans ain’t the way to build support.
Micah Shrewsberry went on a 2:40 rant in his postgame press conference, which included hitting a mic.
“You think I should be fired? Good for you. You’re allowed to have opinions. A lot of people have given up this team and given up on me. I don’t really give a damn.” pic.twitter.com/e0xP2xFvCi
— Matt Freeman (@mattfreeman05_) February 17, 2025
There was some hope at the start of this year that this team might compete for an NIT berth, since the Big Dance still felt out of reach given the state of the roster. And that hope was backed up by opening the season 4-0, including a 21-point road win against Georgetown. Then the team dropped five straight games, starting with an 84-77 home loss to Elon. That was followed by an agonizing 85-84 overtime loss to Rutgers in which Burton went down with a knee injury and freshman Cole Certa fouled in a tie game because he thought the Irish were trailing, allowing the Scarlet Knights to hit the game-winning free throw.
The first loss was emblematic of a team that got too big for its britches, not unlike the football team dropping its home opener to Northern Illinois two years after losing the home opener to Marshall. The second loss highlighted the roster’s tenuous depth and incompetence in game situations.
Of Notre Dame’s 17 losses this season, 11 have been by single digits. And the results would make it easy to think that this team contracted the yips, knowing that a close game meant an opportunity to blow it. Cases in point (just to name a few), they gave a Miami team that was 0-10 in conference their first win of the season and choked away halftime/second-half leads against North Carolina, NC State, Syracuse and Wake Forest.
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Matt Cashore-Imagn Images
If there’s anything giving some semblance of hope for the future under Shrewsberry, it’s that you can squint and see the remnants of resilience and togetherness that the 2023-24 team displayed late last season. Things looked really grim this year after Notre Dame immediately followed up Shrewsberry’s post-Louisville rant with a 97-73 home loss to SMU. But the Irish have now managed to claw out late-season, single-digit wins against Pittsburgh, Stanford and Cal, the last one being a four-overtime thriller. And, in each game, you can see engagement and support from the bench.
It’s too little, too late for this year, one that can’t be written off or excused because of various injuries to Burton and classmate Braeden Shrewsberry, freshman Sir Mohammed and Princeton grad transfer Matt Allocco. But that doesn’t mean the program has to go scorched earth.
Sure, the Irish need better than Kebba Njie, Julian Roper, and Nikita Konstantynoskyi, all due respect to those guys. But they also just need better from guys like J.R. Konieczny (assuming he’ll put up with a fifth year in South Bend), Garrett Sundra and Certa to compliment the freshmen recruiting class and eventual portal additions (because there need to be portal additions, plural).
It won’t be easy, and severe change — honestly, a borderline overhaul — needs to take place this offseason. But for all the 2024-25 Notre Dame men’s basketball failed to deliver, there’s water in the glass for those inclined to view it as some portion full, even if not half.
Because it’s a lot less than half.