In March 2015, the Notre Dame men’s basketball team played Northeastern in a first-round NCAA tournament game in Pittsburgh. The game came down to a final possession, Notre Dame leading by two. Northeastern, a No. 14 seed, ran the clock down, hoping to get an open three-pointer to win the game.
Notre Dame Coach Mike Brey could do nothing but watch as the Huskies, who trailed by 10 with under five minutes to play, moved the ball around the perimeter. Finally, Quincy Ford, with a defender in his face, saw an opening and drove inside looking for a tie. But Jerian Grant reached in and poked the ball free with three seconds left. Zach Auguste grabbed the ball, was fouled and made both free throws. The Irish hung on, 69-65, avoiding one of those upsets that make the tournament special.
After going through the ritual news conference, Brey stood against a wall outside his locker room, looking as drained as you might expect.
I asked him what he was thinking as those final seconds played out.
“You really want to know?” he asked. “I was thinking it’s nice and quiet at Rehoboth this time of year.”
That’s Mike Brey. He is as competitive as anyone — you don’t win 580 games at the Division I level if you aren’t — but he has always known that there is more to life than winning basketball games.
That’s why he will walk away from Notre Dame in March completely at peace with his 23 seasons at the school and his 28 seasons as a college head coach, even if he didn’t rule out a return down the line. Whether he spends his time at his house in Rehoboth, here in D.C. (his fiancee, Suzanne Eyler, has two children who live here) or in Florida nearer his grandchildren, he will be just fine. He turns 64 in March, and he has known for a long time that there is life after coaching.
“I’ll do it for as long as I enjoy it,” he said to me once. “But I’m not going to hang on for dear life when the time comes.”
Notre Dame is 9-11 this season and a disappointing 1-8 in the ACC. But a year ago, the Irish were 24-11 and reached the second round of the NCAA tournament, winning a play-in game and then upsetting Alabama. When Brey arrived in South Bend in 2000, Notre Dame hadn’t been to the NCAAs in a decade. He ended that drought his first year and has made 12 more tournament appearances — it would have been 13 if not for the coronavirus cancellation — and is Notre Dame’s winningest coach with 481 victories.
Brey almost stepped away after last season’s success. “We made the tournament again; we won two games and played in three really good games,” he said. “But then I thought I had six fifth-year guys coming back and I owed it to them to try to make one last run. Maybe we can still do it.”
When Notre Dame was on the tournament bubble in March, Brey thought about walking away and going after the open job at George Washington, his alma mater. “I said to Suzanne, ‘If we don’t make it, I think I should take a hard look at GW,’ ” he said. “But then we made it and won a couple games.”
He also admitted that the new world of college sports — name, image and likeness payments to players and the transfer portal — may have accelerated his decision. “The only way to describe what’s going on is exhausting,” he said. “It never stops, and it isn’t about coaching — not the way I learned to coach, anyway.”
Brey is from a jock family: His father, Paul, was a high school athletic director in Montgomery County, but the real athlete was his mom, Betty, who swam on the U.S. Olympic team in 1956. I swam in Masters swim meets that Betty Brey entered, and the question, when she swam butterfly, wasn’t whether she would win her age group but whether she would break another world record.
“I don’t know where I got my athletic genes,” Brey likes to say. “But they sure didn’t come from my mom.”
Brey played for Morgan Wootten at DeMatha and said he worried he might break Wootten’s streak of sending every one of his players to college on a scholarship. He got one — to Northwestern State in Louisiana — and transferred home to finish college at George Washington. He was captain of the team in 1982 and, after graduating, went to work for Wootten.
In 1987, when Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski was looking for an assistant coach, he visited Wootten.
“We had recruited Danny Ferry a couple of years earlier,” Krzyzewski said Friday morning. “I’d gone to a lot of DeMatha practices. Morgan always lets his assistants coach, and Mike just sort of jumped out at me. He was really good at teaching, and he had a great demeanor with the players. I was pretty sure he was special. Morgan confirmed that.”
Brey stayed at Duke for eight years, a period during which Duke went to six Final Fours. “I called him my Final Four coach,” Krzyzewski said. “He had a way with the players. He had that kind of moxie that you recognize in a special player. I could see it very clearly when he was at DeMatha.”
When Delaware offered Brey its head coaching job in 1995, he was ready. “Heck, I’d learned from Morgan and K,” he said. “If I wasn’t ready after that, I was never going to be ready.”
He took Delaware to two NCAA tournaments and an NIT in five years. That’s when Notre Dame came calling. “I was really happy at Delaware,” Brey said. “I looked at Morgan and how many college jobs he’d turned down because he was happy at DeMatha. The thought of just staying at Delaware crossed my mind more than once.”
But Notre Dame was an offer he couldn’t refuse: an academic school, a national reputation, the Big East (at the time). He was named coach of the year in the Big East and the ACC, which Notre Dame later joined, and developed a philosophy that served him well: “Get old and stay old.”
More often than not, Brey was able to do that. His teams made the Elite Eight in 2015 (after the Northeastern scare) and 2016. The first year, the Irish led a 37-0 Kentucky team in the final two minutes before losing, 68-66.
On Friday morning, Brey admitted he would have loved to have coached in the Final Four but said he still felt great about his decision.
“In 2009, we just missed the NCAAs but made it to the NIT semifinals,” he said. “C.M. Newton was NIT chairman, and he got up at the pretournament news conference and said: ‘For the most part, there are two kinds of coaches — those who’ve been fired and those who are going to be fired. I never made the Final Four, but I also never got fired.’
“That stuck with me. I can walk away and say, ‘I’ve never been fired.’ I think I can feel good about that. I do feel good about that.”
