Mike Brey Appreciation Post

Mike Brey is awesome.  I’m long overdue for this post.  Four weeks ago, I traveled down to Newark, Delaware, to see Notre Dame take on Delaware in basketball.  It was the first year since before I was a student at Notre Dame that I didn’t get to any football games, but I wanted to get to a basketball game (as I’ve said before, Notre Dame is a basketball school now).  So Jon took the train up to Newark and I took the bus down.  I had previously made a point of going to Delaware for a minor league baseball game, but I’m pretty sure that this was the first time I’ve ever spent a night in the state of Delaware.

After dealing with Penn Station and the snow on the day of Santacon (not a day that I’d want to be in the city, but it was early so people weren’t too drunk yet), I arrived in Newark around 5:00.  Jon and I got dinner and watched the end of Army-Navy before going to the game.

The guy taking our picture could have easily gotten the court in the background, but he chose this angle instead.

The arena holds 5,000 people, so pretty much every seat in the house is fairly close to the action.  This was definitely Delaware’s biggest home game of the year.  To buy tickets from Delaware, you had to buy season tickets.  I actually considered doing that and then selling all the rest of the games on Stubhub.  Season tickets were actually cheaper than a lot of the tickets on the secondary market for this game.  But we monitored prices and bought at the right time for a reasonable price.  We were in the second to last row, but pretty close to half court.  The TV cameras were above us just off to our right.  It was a much better view than I’ll have if I go to the ACC Tournament.

Our view for the game

We were a little shaky early on, but we seemed to have taken control by halftime.  We led 38-27.  We played a very good second half and won 92-68.  Bonzie Colson, Matt Farrell, and T.J. Gibbs almost outscored Delaware by themselves (they had19, 24, and 21).  Colson and Martin Geben both had 12 rebounds.  We were 13-23 from three.  So it ended up being a convincing win.

Notre Dame played at Delaware because former Notre Dame player and assistant coach Martin Inglesby is in his second year as head coach at Delaware.  Mike Brey was also Delaware’s head coach before coming to Notre Dame.  He got a nice hand from the crowd during the pre-game introductions.

Mike Brey made the tournament as Delaware's coach twice.

This banner is from after Brey's time at Delaware.  No Delaware didn't win a game, they were one of 60 teams to get a first round bye when the NCAA insisted on calling the first round "the second round."

The next morning, Jon and I got a good breakfast and then he was off.  I went went to mass for the second Sunday of Advent and then took a walk across campus to my bus.  One day I'll have to try to figure out how many different states I've attended mass in.

Eggs Benedict with blue cheese

Delaware's snow-covered campus

Since the Delaware game, Mike Brey has passed Digger Phelps become Notre Dame’s winningest men’s basketball coach.  And today we won at Syracuse for the first time in 11 years.  It’s always nice to beat Jim Boeheim.  The last two games have been without our best player, Bonzie Colson, who might be out for the rest of the year (hopefully not, but we’ll see).  Also today, we didn’t have our second best player, Matt Farrell.  A lot of people were very worried when Colson got hurt.  I would put myself in the “a little worried” category.  Brey has had a lot more success than people expected in the past when we lost some good players (although not back in 2014 when we lost Jerian Grant).  We still have a lot of work to do, but we definitely still have a chance to make the NCAA Tournament.  3-0 in the ACC is a good start.  I love Mike Brey.

Some quick thoughts on football.  I wasn’t motivated to get to a game this year because of how much of a disaster last year was.  It turns out we had some really fun wins.  The game at Boston College was the one game I wanted to go to at the last minute, but I was hoping to go stay with John and take him to the game but it turned out that his wife was due to give birth that week (I hadn’t realized that the baby was due that soon).  It would have been fun to see us run all over Boston College.  The USC game was wonderful.  But then November happened.  The Miami game was a total disaster.  And it’s a problem that we can’t win at Stanford.  The Citrus Bowl was painful to watch at times, but it was really fun at the end.  It was a ten win season (definitely better than I was expecting) and our best bowl win since January 1, 1994.  But we still haven’t won a major bowl under Kelly.  And we had a very good opportunity to get to a major bowl at the start of November (the playoff was a legitimate possibility too).  I would like to think that we have to get to a major bowl next year.  If not, isn’t nine years and an 0-2 record in major bowls enough?

I hope to get to a game or two next year.  We’re playing Syracuse at Yankee Stadium next year so I definitely plan to go to that one.  I’d be up for a home game as well if my friends are going to any.  My preference is always September games (to avoid conflict with baseball playoffs in October and cold weather in November).  And I prefer attending afternoon games.  That pretty much leaves Vanderbilt as my ideal home game to attend, but I might be talked into one of the night games.  It’s also been a long time since I went to an away game on another team’s campus (part of why I wanted to go to the Boston College game this year).  Wake Forest, Virginia Tech, and Northwestern would all be interesting to me if I could get tickets at a reasonable price.  I assume it’s much easier to get to Northwestern than the other two.

Happy Birthday Lou Holtz!