JC’s are allowed, but they need the proper math credits to transfer in. Most players at JC’s don’t take that kind of class.

You do realize that the other sports you list all have different success factors than men’s basketball at ND, right?

I’m not saying we can’t do better, because we can. But a blanket statement that “this olympic sport played by kids who fit ND’s current demographic has won it all, so why shouldn’t this other sport whose blue-chip athletes might need some convincing to play at ND?” doesn’t exactly work.

If you want to propose an improvement for the Irish, then you have to know what you are dealing with, and too many here seem to think it’s a relative easy solution to find a new coach, recruit better players, and have them play better in the post-season. Come on! Look how hard it was in football, where ND has a comparative advantage and history. Basketball is an even tougher terrain, because the tournament (based on media and gamblers greed) has come to mean so much to everyone.

As some people here have suggested, athletic talent is paramount in the tournament, first because all the other teams are of fairly high quality; second, because teams don’t have enough time or information to make plans work well; and third, because, in the crunch, hard work may not be enough if you don’t have an extra gear, at least for some key players.

Notre Dame’s talent deficit should be clear just from listening to how so many of the announcers and commentaters regularly refer to the gap. It should be obvious from the accolades that Brey receives from fellow coaches. Why do people here assume they are so much smarter than the professionals?

I tried to figure out a way to estimate teams’ relative athletic talent. Imperfect as it is, I chose two relatively simple calculations that have some intuitive logic: 1) how many players from a college are now members of the NBA; and 2) how valuable (in annual salary) does the NBA consider these assets. The data are from the ESPN website. Of course, this only measures really top players, but we know they are crucial in tournaments, and we can probably assume that second level players not quite making the NBA would be congruent in quality for top tier versus other tier teams.

The results are not surprising, given my expectations, but they are astonishing anyway in how much they seem to say. The NBA has players originating from 111 colleges, a very large number, but the distributions are far from even. Sixty-nine of those schools have only one or two NBA members. Five have more than a dozen. The seventy produce a total of 94, while the top five alone produce 81. If we look at the values, the sixty-nine produce about 315.5 million in salary while the five produce 313.8 million, essentially the same. This is a massively skewed distribution.

Is it relevant for NCAA tournament victory? Well surprise, surprise, but the top five are exactly the same five who have won the last five championships: Duke, Kentucky, Connecticut, North Carolina, and Kansas. If we expand the elite to the top nine rather than just five, then these nine have won 18 out of the last 22 championships (and they’ve also been the challenger in nine). These data should dispel any notions of parity or underdogs or “anyone can win” that infest media coverage to gin up excitement. Yes, with 65 games you will get upsets and surprises (that shouldn’t really be surprising), but to win the whole thing takes more than Cinderella wishes. It takes talent!

Now where does ND fit on the talent scale? It’s quite dismal. ND has only two current NBA players, and they aren’t highly valued. Their combined value is under 650K, which is absolutely last among the 25 2-player group and puts it eighth last among all 111, just ahead of schools like Arkansas – LR, Blinn College, and Tennessee Tech and just behind Hofstra, Norfolk State, and San Bernardino.
For direct comparison, look at some of ND’s current and future competitors:

ND 2 $642,944
Syracuse 4 $28,711,383
Marquette 5 $29,408,786
Connecticut 13 $76,047,203
N Carolina 17 $41,793,582
Duke 19 $80,994,780

I don’t think the relevant question is why Mike Brey isn’t winning more games; it’s how does he manage to win any? He’s a damned miracle worker!

If the goal is to make ND competitive with these other schools, and competitiveness requires more equalized talent, then how does ND do it? Look at the task at hand. Is it really practical to think that ND can recruit not just twenty Ben Hanbroughs, but all twenty averaging better than Ben, so that we’ll be even with Duke? Come on? And even if our goals are less lofty, what needs to change to get what we need. I don’t think it’s a change of coach.

Think: how many NBA quality players will face ND academics and mediocre facilities in South Bend, have the qualifications to be accepted, and then choose ND over Duke or North Carolina, some other Catholic school in an urban area, or some small college where they can be a big fish with basketball as king? It’s Notre Dame – the school – that needs to make a full push and change if they want it, and I don’t think they do. Mike Brey is NOT the problem.