Brey Excited For Irish Youth & New ACC Schedule In 2019-20
It was a morning full of Notre Dame basketball as Mike Brey, TJ Gibbs and Rex Pflueger took the stage at ACC Media Day.
2018-19 will be different for Brey as he boasts a roster full of youth, so it wasn’t a shock the topic was brought up immediately.
“It is different for us,” stated Brey. “There’s no question about it. I tell them to get old and stay old, and we've lived by that. But it's a little different rotation this year.
“It certainly starts with these two guys to my right and left setting the tone. We have five freshmen, and a transfer and four of the freshmen and the transfer will all be part of it. It's kind of exciting new territory for me to watch them grow strategically. We went on a foreign tour this summer, so we had extra reps and the ten extra practices that were so important for this particular team.”
As the season is quickly approaching, Brey knows it’s crucial to catch his freshmen up as much as he can, but he has comfort in knowing the new faces mesh with the experience on the roster.
“The new faces that we do have fit who we are,” explained Brey. “There's some shot makers in that group. Scoring for us last year was a little bit tricky at times especially when a (Bonzie) Colson and a (Matt) Farrell was down. I think we can stretch the floor again that way. I can't say enough about the job these two guys have done as leaders because it's more heavy lifting when you have five freshmen and a transfer that you're breaking in.”
ACC commissioner John Swofford announced Wednesday the conference would go from 18 to 20 conference games in 2019-2020. In addition, Swofford said the league will start the season with intra-conference matchups in November as part of a seven-game event to start the season.
The move will help make early season games important, but it also brings a lot of pressure to programs to make sure they start the season off right.
Brey led the charge to move to a 20-game ACC schedule, so it wasn’t a surprise he was excited to hear the news.
“Those are the other two points that the other coaches in the league are mad at me about,” said Brey. “We started talking about how to get more bids in this league because we had just come from the Big East, (Jim) Boeheim and Jamie Dixon, it was our first meeting. We were the first league to go from 16 to 18 league games. Have we ever thought about, what about 20 league games? I thought it got us more bids when we went to 16 and 18 and they almost ran me out of the room down there in Jacksonville.
“It has to happen as we have the ACC Network coming online. I think it strengthens everybody's schedule. And you have no choice if you go to 20 league games and that's a good thing for more bids for our league.”
Getting more teams in the NCAA Tournament is always good for conferences and the ACC has shown the ability to put the most teams in since the ACC realignment in 2013 and 2014.
“The philosophy of this league, I think, when I got back here -- in the Big East, the philosophy was how many bids can we get,” Brey stated. “The philosophy was here how do we protect the 1 seeds? How are the 1 seeds protected? I really think that's changed in the last couple of years where our league has looked and said we're more about getting nine, ten, how do we get more bids.
“I thought that was a philosophical change. The best conference in America opening the season next year is a no-brainer. I think it's exciting. I would say it was split in the room when it came up. It needed to gain some momentum in Jacksonville two years ago. It's a no-brainer to come right out of the gate with the ACC playing basketball and helping the network out, having programming right out of the gate.”
When it comes to basketball, Brey suspects the usual suspects will be the teams the Irish will chase for the conference title.
“I've got so much respect for Virginia and North Carolina and what they have coming back and Virginia Tech,” said Brey. “Duke is really gifted. There's a lot of young faces, a lot of new guys.
“After you get through those couple, then there's a lot of people you can throw in there four to ten, to 11. We want to get into that four to nine range and see if we can snag a bid. That’s the great thing about the league. You can play your way into that position with the strength of it. The unbalanced schedule makes it interesting and sometimes that breaks right for you and sometimes that breaks you.”