Shameless plug (and piece of context): back in my heyday as Observer sports editor, I wrote a column during the 2020-21 Notre Dame men’s basketball season, right after some students at Purcell Pavilion started chanting for Mike Brey to be fired.
The crux of the piece was to ask how Brey would be remembered for his time at Notre Dame. Would it be for all the good he did after a decade of irrelevance before he was hired — and for doing it in two historically difficult conferences, no less? Or would it be for the way the program fell into disarray at the end of his tenure?