It’s sort of hard to believe we ended up here.

Notre Dame men’s basketball made two straight Elite Eights in the 2015 and 2016 seasons, something no other program could claim.

Since those runs, ND has played in precisely two NCAA tournament games, both in 2017 (a fine team in its own right that just ran into a terrible matchup with West Virginia). That wasn’t exactly what we had in mind as a follow-up.

A fan base that had thirsted to make a jump into, if not college basketball’s elite, perhaps at least elite-adjacent, briefly believed it was possible after those two Elite Eights. However, that pipe dream has been yanked away by a series of missteps, bad breaks and bad decisions. Instead of being a program on the rise, the Irish are very likely to miss the Big Dance for a third straight time, despite Monday’s rousing comeback win over cellar-dwelling North Carolina (a fun phrase to write). And there are not a lot of reasons for optimism that the streak will stop there.

How did we get here? This three-article series will try to provide a brief road map. Here’s the first thing that went wrong:

Swinging big and missing, badly, in recruiting

Mike Brey has never out-and-out said as much, but it seems obvious that in the past several years, he started taking some big swings in recruiting. To date a guy that relied mostly on lower-level recruits than his opposition — Steve Vasturia, for instance, only had offers from Northwestern and BC among the major conferences when ND signed him — Brey began taking his hacks at the big boys in the mid-2010s. Perhaps he saw a ceiling on what he could do with the guys who had something to prove, perhaps he just had a feeling some of the guys he wanted to pursue would be more receptive to his pitch than guys in the past. Who knows?

The first noted example of this was Thon Maker, who oddly enough never ended up playing in college, finding a loophole in the NBA’s one-year-out-of-high-school rule. Maker was unanimously projected to be an NBA lottery pick and one-and-done guy, and he was, going #10 to the Bucks in 2016 at age 19. It’s never been reported where Maker was going to go had he been forced to go to college, but Notre Dame was in on him. His Rivals.com page also has him interested in offers listed from Kansas, Arizona State, Indiana and St. John’s. Of course, after he was permitted to enter the NBA draft, that proved to be a whiff.

Brey kept swinging, though. Recruitniks might remember that he pursued Cole Anthony, who’s now at Carolina and is also a projected one-and-done lottery pick. Georgetown and Oregon were also supposedly finalists for Anthony, so it’s easy to be skeptical of how much he was really interested in ND, but he always maintained he was.

He also pursued another top-50 player, 2020 HS grad Hunter Dickinson, who like Brey was a DeMatha kid. However, Dickinson, who also took visits to Duke and Florida State, opted for Michigan, which means we’re all obligated to hate him now.

Brey was successful in luring one recruit that he previously might not have gotten, a borderline top-50 guy. The trouble is that that one recruit was D.J. Harvey, who had two uneven seasons and by some accounts was robbed of some of the athletic gifts that made him a hot commodity by a knee injury that required microfracture surgery – to say nothing of the fact that his Carmelo-ish one-on-one game wasn’t really a great fit for Brey’s freewheeling system to begin with. Harvey transferred after last season and went to Vanderbilt (he might end up playing the Irish next year in the Barclays Center Legends Classic if the matchups shake out right).

Taking these big recruiting swings were probably worthy gambles, but missing on them (including the one he did get) left Brey with no apparent backup plan. Harvey was ND’s only recruit in the class of ’17, and after ND missed out on Anthony – and Rex Pflueger was granted a fifth year – they took a zero in ’19 as well. (For whatever it’s worth, the 2020 class, so far, features two three-star kids, Matt Zona and Elijah Taylor, whose recruiting profiles are closer to the kinds of kids Brey used to butter his bread with.)

These are huge depth hits that stacked up when the Irish ran into the 2nd item on this list, which will be the subject of the next article, coming soon. (A tease!)