Mike Brey to retire as Notre Dame coach.

Mike Brey needed only one season to turn Notre Dame from a forgotten program into an NCAA Tournament team, will retire at the end of season.

Mike Brey to retire as Notre Dame coach.

The end of an era is near in South Bend. According to Notre Dame reporter Tim Noie, Fighting Irish head basketball coach Mike Brey will retire at the conclusion of the current 2022-23 season. 

Here was the news from Noie, which he shared on Twitter:

“BREAKING: Source tells South Bend Tribune that #NotreDame coach Mike Brey will retire at end of season. Brey plans to tell team after practice today. The winningest coach in program history will have spent last 23 seasons at Notre Dame.”

Notre Dame has just one NCAA Tournament appearance in the last six seasons under Brey and are on the outside looking in this year with a losing record through 19 games.

Brey left Delaware in July 2000 after taking the Blue Hens to two NCAA Tournaments in three seasons — something that seemed little more than an afterthought in South Bend, considering that in the nine seasons following Digger Phelps’ retirement in 1991, Notre Dame’s once blue-chip program had been shut out of the NCAA tourney and had earned only three NIT bids.

But the man who served as an assistant under America’s best-known prep coach — Morgan Wootten at Maryland’s DeMatha High School — and under Division I’s winningest college coach, Mike Krzyzewski, helped Notre Dame return to its more glorious days.

Notre Dame snapped a 10-year tourney drought in 2001 and made 13 total tourney appearances under Brey. He won 15 tourney games, tying the school record, and Notre Dame reached back-to-back Elite Eights in 2015 and 2016.

“That Mike is the winningest coach in the 119-year history of Notre Dame men’s basketball speaks to his skill as a teacher of the game,” Swarbrick said. “His even greater legacy, however, lies in his achievements as an educator and mentor of the young men who played for him. In that sense, he represents this university as well as any coach I have worked with during my time at Notre Dame.”

Brey was more than a basketball coach.