SOUTH BEND — This is what you get.
When a university pours all its time and effort and finances into your football program, this is what you get.
When you refuse to rely on the transfer portal to inject some immediate and needed athleticism and ability into your basketball roster, this is what you get.
When the best you can do from said transfer portal are recent additions from basketball factories Lehigh and Monmouth, Northern Arizona and Madonna University, this is what you get.
When you compete in the Atlantic Coast Conference with boys while so many others have men, this is what you get.
When you demand that head coach Micah Shrewsberry win in a way that so few high-major Division I schools can win, this is what you get.
This is where Notre Dame is following Tuesday’s historic loss to No. 1 Duke. This is what you get. This is Notre Dame basketball today, tomorrow and likely, for years down the road. It doesn’t matter the head coach.
Hey, if football is good, Notre Dame is good.
After Tuesday, there’s nothing left to do about this college basketball season, about these last three college basketball seasons, but own it. And apologize for putting a product on the floor that is this overmatched. For focusing everything on football and so little on basketball.
Own every excruciating minute that played out in front of a sold-out Purcell Pavilion crowd, many of whom finished off a 100-56 Notre Dame loss with chants of “Let’s Go Duke!” to the point that you wondered if you were in Cameron Indoor Stadium.
This wasn’t Cameron Indoor. They live and breathe basketball there. Here, it’s become a diversion, something to pass the time between the end of the college football season and the start of spring football.
Who cares if Markus Burton returns as long as C.J. Carr did.
Own having to sit and watch all of it, as Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua did for the entire 40 minutes in the second row behind the Irish bench. Own every turnover committed by Notre Dame in the frontcourt, every missed shot, every Duke runout and dunk. Every boo.
Own watching the Irish deficit grow from 10 points with 15:55 left in the first half, to 20 points with 6:30 left to 30 with 31 seconds left and then, finally to 40 with 11:30 remaining. Notre Dame’s deficit topped out at 46. Surely, it could have hit 50. We’ve certainly seen that.
This is what Notre Dame gets when it decides that while basketball is an important piece to its athletic department, it’s not particularly important. It can just be OK. It’s not OK.
The blood shed Tuesday is on everyone’s hands — the basketball program, the athletic department, the university, the fan base. Everybody is at fault for letting this program go. Ten years ago, Notre Dame was on the brink of a second consecutive NCAA Tournament Elite Eight. Now, we get this.
We really should have seen this historic beatdown coming
The South Dome of Purcell Pavilion, formerly known as the Joyce Center, formerly known as the Athletic and Convocation Center, has seen its share of high-level basketball since the doors opened in 1968. It has seen big wins. It has seen magical moments. It has seen upsets of No. 1 teams like Duke.
It has never seen what it saw Tuesday. Duke’s 44-point win was the most lopsided Irish loss in the history of the South Dome. It beat the 39-point victory by Kentucky on February 12, 1995. The last time Notre Dame lost by more points at home, it was 1898 when it played in Carroll Hall Gym. It lost to Chicago First Regiment. It was 64-8.
Must have focused too much on football that year, too.
Adding injury to insult, Shrewsberry may have shredded an Achilles in the first half. He left the arena on crutches and declined to discuss the latest Irish injury. His.
“The season from Hell continues,” Shrewsberry said.
In more ways than one.
This was as bad as bad has ever been in the old South Dome. Bad basketball, bad effort, bad mojo. Everything. Bad.
The easiest solution for what ails a Notre Dame team now 12-16 overall, 3-12 in the ACC and currently on the outside looking in for next month’s conference tournament is to fire the head coach. Of course. After this one, just fire everybody. Eat the final four seasons of Shrewsberry’s contract. Hit the reset button and start over. Sounds good right about now, right?
It hasn’t worked since Notre Dame last did that in 2023. Where is the evidence that it will work now? Here’s a hint – it won’t.
Firing everybody only prolongs the problem. Subtracting Shrewsberry and starting over won’t fix what ails Notre Dame basketball. A new coach, a new staff, a new direction but the same old issues.
Can Bevacqua look Shrewsberry in the eye, as he has Marcus Freeman, and say that he has done everything in his power to get the basketball program to be good? Be elite? Does anyone over there care that the answer is a resounding, no?
For Notre Dame to be good at basketball, Notre Dame at its collective core, must care about basketball. The sport has sailed off into a different stratosphere. Notre Dame is still stuck at the station wanting to do it the way it did it in the 1990s and 2000s and 2010s. It won’t pay players what it needs to pay players to compete. It won’t open doors to any and all transfer portal possibilities.
It won’t run a college basketball program the way a college program needs to run in 2026. It wants to do it the same way it did in five, 10, 15 years ago. Everything about the sport has changed; Notre Dame hasn’t.
Tuesday should be Notre Dame’s basketball wake-up call. It needs to see why what happened against Duke happened and understand that there’s only one way to fix it. Get into 2026. Open your eyes and your checkbook and act like the eighth winningest program in college basketball history.
Be a player in college basketball and stop getting played.
Games like Tuesday will soon become the norm. Maybe next year down in Cameron. Maybe again in the South Dome. Just when you think it cannot get any worse, it gets worse.
That won’t change, not until the way Notre Dame does its basketball business changes.
Follow South Bend Tribune and NDInsider columnist Tom Noie on X (formerly Twitter): @tnoieNDI. Contact Noie at [email protected]
