Facilities, not coach the key issue at ND

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On the Friday before the Notre Dame-Tennessee football game in 2004, Kevin White consented to answer a few questions.

He didn't say much, but the Irish athletic director's wide-angle view of the languishing Irish program presented a different image than the flaws magnified in the public's microscopic scrutiny of Tyrone Willingham.

White said he could distinguish between the direction of a season -- 5-3 at that point, coming off a loss to Boston College -- and the direction of a program. Implicit support for Willingham could be gleaned between those lines.

Sometime over the next three weeks, the direction of the season and the direction of the program merged in the minds of the university leadership, headed the wrong way.

Willingham would "not be retained." A coaching change that the best guesses projected as at least another year off jarred the program sooner rather than later.

That precedent -- generic responses and tepid support from White, who announced a firing three weeks later -- makes Mike Brey's job status seem almost as tenuous as Willingham's.

It's only an undercurrent now, a gentle but persistent tug that threatens to pull Brey under, nothing like the waves that crashed against Willingham.

Compared to the raging rapids that buffeted Mike Davis at Indiana, to bring the conversation around to basketball, sentiment against Brey feels like little ripples lapping at the shore.

But at the end of a third straight disappointing regular season for the Notre Dame men's basketball team, you can't help but wonder.

What do the same administrators who made the bold decision to fire Willingham after three years think about Brey's body of work through six?

Does the Irish coach who shadowed Davis with early highs and recent lows -- although IU looks like an NCAA Tournament team again -- deserve more slack or a pink slip?

Has Brey done the best job possible given the state of administrative support for Notre Dame basketball, or has his failure to capitalize on a Sweet 16 kept the program second-rate?

Can the powers that be distinguish between the direction of this 15-12 season and the direction of the program under Brey?

Without denying that "you are what you are" -- and we all know who made that phrase popular at Notre Dame -- that win-loss record and the circumstances of reaching it only complicate the answers.

This team seems like more than the sum of its Ws and Ls, both a credit and debit in the final analysis of Brey. He kept the Irish together when they could have splintered under the weight of so many crushing defeats, but he never got the win or two it would have taken to make this conversation moot.

Like that business about direction, bad luck and bad strategy intersected somewhere along that journey. They reached the Big East tournament in spite of it all, but just barely, at once an accomplishment and an illustration of the distance between them and their ambition.

"I didn't think so and I'm sure none of my teammates or coaches thought we would be in this position, actually fighting to get one of the final spots in it," Torin Francis said. "But that's what we did have to do and obviously we got it done."

Despite his worst record in six years, it might have taken Brey's best coaching job to keep it from falling apart, just another contradiction in a program stuck in neutral.

Six years into Brey's tenure, those spinning wheels raised questions for White, who answered by e-mail. His careful e-vasions were as vague as anything he said about Willingham. Considering what happened to him, you can't help but wonder what might become of Brey.

In interest and investment, men's basketball doesn't compare to football at Notre Dame, or its competing program at Indiana for that matter.

It doesn't absolve Brey of his responsibility for the product on the floor to say the university needs to evaluate its commitment to the sport before it considers a coaching change.

All the gushing over the importance of the Guglielmino Athletics Complex to the football program proved the administration recognized the significance of infrastructure to a team's success.

Men's basketball got a locker room makeover a few years ago, but otherwise just empty promises of an arena renovation that must make modern consumer-recruits think twice.

Back when the Irish were making the NCAA Tournament, the buzz about Brey was that he would leave Notre Dame for just that reason, speculation as persistent as the public doubts about him now.

However valid the questions about his performance over the last three years, until those fundamental administrative issues are addressed, a new coach won't be the answer.

Source: South Bend Tribune