​SOUTH BEND – The story of what this season could be for Notre Dame basketball begins with what happened at the end of last season. What’s next? This is the recruiting challenge Notre Dame now faces. For 18 years in the Big East, followed by 12 years in the Atlantic Coast Conference, Notre Dame could count on a week at the league tournament as a chance to reset or to surge into the NCAA Tournament. The league tournament often felt like a second life, where winning or losing mattered less than just having a chance to come together for another week. Then 2023-24 happened. Last March happened. The regular-season finale against Boston College, a longtime league foe, signaled something different.
The final buzzer was still echoing at Conte Forum when the realization hit: for the first time in program history, and since those solemn days as an independent, there would be no league tournament. Notre Dame wasn’t good enough. A season that finished 13-18 overall and 4-14 in the ACC was over, and that ending did not sit well with the Irish locker room or with the flight home. Even when a season isn’t going well, nobody wants it to end early. Ending early is unacceptable for a program that, a little over a decade ago, nearly captured a second ACC Tournament title with Bonzie Colson’s sprained ankle.
“It was wild,” sophomore power forward Brady Koehler said. “Losing that game, instantly you know, it’s over.” “It’s an awful feeling,” said senior guard Braeden Shrewsberry. “That was embarrassing. You never want to feel like that again in your life. It was a bad feeling, but it also motivated you to get back in the gym and improve as a team.” “We can’t let that happen again.”
On Wednesday, July 8, after a summer conditioning session that even included a few jabs and upper cuts in the boxing ring across from the Joyce Center, the remaining holdovers from that squad discussed, for the first time, what it meant to miss the ACC Tournament for the first time. If they have anything to say about it this season, it will likely be the last time that happens. This year, like last, the league’s bottom three teams—Nos. 16, 17, and 18 after 18 conference games—will not be invited back to Greensboro in early March.
There’s the motto for 2026-27: Just Get to Greensboro. Put it in the locker room, in the team room, on the wall of the practice court at Rolfs Hall. In the coaches’ meeting room. Everywhere. Get to Greensboro. Don’t expect No to be better for SEO. This is a program building around the idea that the path forward must lead to that postseason stage, even if it means redefining what success looks like and how to measure it this season.