SOUTH BEND, Ind. — This was supposed to be the year when it all fell into place for Micah Shrewsberry. His first recruiting classes at Notre Dame would be battle-hardened juniors and seniors, traditionally how the Irish had the most basketball success before his arrival. That was his plan as well after arriving from Penn State.
Instead, he’s getting ready to incorporate six new transfers, unprecedented at Notre Dame, to replace six departed players. It’s not just how many left, but who and why. Markus Burton, a hometown hero, to Indiana. Cole Certa, Shrewsberry’s first recruit at Notre Dame, to Clemson. Jalen Haralson, Shrewsberry’s highest-ranked recruit at ND, to Tennessee. All got big-money deals that were out of Notre Dame’s financial league in men’s basketball.
Shrewsberry arrived at Notre Dame almost at the exact moment when college basketball’s new free-agent world hit, and after three sub-.500 years — 13-20, 15-18 and 13-18, with a 19-39 record in the ACC — he was probably going to have to pivot from the plan he had when he arrived anyway. The exodus helped provoke a rethinking, because what works elsewhere doesn’t always work at Notre Dame, even if the end goal hasn’t changed.
“You don’t have a choice but to adapt,” Shrewsberry told Hoops HQ. “When you get here, you think this is the way that we can build it. I was actually texting with coach (Mike) Brey last week, and his old saying of ‘get old and stay old,’ that’s what you want to do in college basketball. That’s who you want to be.
“We thought our path would be to get them, develop them and keep them, because of what this place is. It’s what Notre Dame is. Thinking that people would really value this education, this experience, maybe what we’re doing on the court, to help them develop and grow as players. You come to find out it doesn’t matter. It matters to some.”
In this case, adapting meant bringing in the six transfers, which isn’t always easy at Notre Dame beyond grad transfers because of the school’s reluctance to count transfer credits (or online classes at all) toward degree progress. Bryce Dortch, a transfer from Rutgers who played AAU ball with Shrewsberry’s son Braeden, a Notre Dame senior, has two seasons of eligibility remaining but will have a heavy summer-school load just to become eligible in the fall.
The keystone of the class is a new one-two pick-and-roll punch. Six-foot-10 Logan Duncomb was the Big South Player of the Year at Winthrop averaging 18.3 points and 8.9 rebounds, while point guard Braeden Smith was a part-time starter at Gonzaga last season after being the Patriot League Player of the Year as a sophomore at Colgate. Notre Dame might not have gone after one without the other, because the intention is to build around the two-man game Duncomb and Smith can play together — essentially buying a new offense in the portal.
Throw in the 6-foot-9 Dortch, who Shrewsberry thinks still has untapped potential to play facing the basket, and former Penn wing Ethan Roberts, a grad transfer who was a key factor in the Quakers’ turnaround under former Irish assistant Fran McCaffery, and there’s more firepower on the outside. The Irish also added sophomore combo guard Devin Brown from Davidson and took a flyer on Division II big man Yoro Diallo, who dominated at Virginia-Wise last season.
And there’s still Braeden Shrewsberry, senior guard Logan Imes and big man Brady Koehler, along with the No. 41 recruiting class per On3, led by four-star guard Jonathan Sanderson and Shrewsberry’s son Nick, a three-star prospect.
“I think the NCAA Tournament is the expectation,” Braeden Shrewsberry told Hoops HQ. “We’ve got a lot of guys who have played in the NCAA Tournament on our team. I’m not one of them, but I want to get there so bad. That’s been my dream my whole life.”
The stress on Micah Shrewsberry clearly showed the past two seasons, whether it was his mic-slamming “If you think I should be fired, good for you” rant after a loss to Louisville in 2025 or chasing after a ref at the end of a loss at Cal last January, even before the staggering 44-point home loss to Duke that cast doubt over whether Notre Dame could even still compete at an ACC level. The Irish bounced back and won at NC State in overtime four days later, but still failed to qualify for the ACC Tournament.
“For me, internally, it’s probably really hard,” Shrewsberry said. “I want to win and I want to win yesterday. That’s the one thing, I’m really focused and driven to try and win here. That’s why I came here. I wanted to get here and have a lot of success and not for me to be celebrated or have a statue like coach (Muffet) McGraw. No. This is what Notre Dame should be. That’s what I remember when I was growing up. Notre Dame should be good at basketball. So I put more stress and anxiety on myself than anything. We’ve got to get this done. We’ve got to get this going. And it needs to happen yesterday.”
Shrewsberry signed a seven-year contract when he arrived in South Bend, and between his buyout and what it would cost to hire a new coach and provide the additional resources it would take to get anyone to take the job, Shrewsberry probably has far more job security than it looks from the outside. (Irish athletic director Pete Bevacqua declined an interview request through a spokesman.) All of that means this summer’s intense portaling is less of a Hail Mary and more of an attempt to figure out what might work at Notre Dame in this new era.
Still, the expectations never change at Notre Dame, where every sport from football to baseball to men’s and women’s basketball to lacrosse is expected to compete at the highest level, even if basketball sometimes struggles to find its niche on campus.
“There’s obviously people that care, but it’s not like football,” Braeden Shrewsberry said. “Football, when they lost the Northern Illinois game, you could feel it when you were walking on campus the next day. It was just quiet. But there’s obviously people that care about basketball, so you want to win for them.”
Ironically, this season’s transition is also how Micah Shrewsberry had success in his second year at Penn State, adding a few key transfers to holdovers from a team that had gone 14-17 in his first season. The Nittany Lions went 23-14, lost to Purdue by two in the Big Ten title game and made it to the second round of the 2023 NCAA Tournament as a No. 10 seed, making him a top candidate for the opening at Notre Dame. It hasn’t worked out the way he planned. Now there’s a new plan.
“It almost feels like starting over,” Micah Shrewsberry said. “We’ve got six transfers. Counting our walk-on, we’ve got four new freshmen. We’ve got two new staff members, about to be three. I felt a lot of weight on my shoulders when I got here, Year 1. I put a lot of it on myself. But here in Year 4, with this group, I’m looking forward to just having fun with these guys. There’s no real weight on my shoulders. I feel kind of refreshed because of this new group. So that’s the optimism. There’s some guys here that have brought some new energy, which I think we needed.”
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