Why Notre Dame vs. Georgia 'will be a little weird' for Mike Brey
Mike Brey owes his 23 years as Notre Dame men’s basketball head coach to a man who will likely be wearing the opponent’s colors Sunday at State Farm Arena in Atlanta. Kevin White, the Irish athletics director from 2000-08 who hired Brey away from Delaware, now pledges part of his loyalty to the Georgia team that will play Notre Dame Sunday (5:30 p.m. ET, ESPN2).
White is 72 and 19 months removed from ending a 13-year run in charge of Duke’s athletic department. His retirement life includes following his son Mike’s basketball coaching career, which took Mike to Georgia last spring after seven years at Florida.
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Mike White broke into coaching as an assistant at Jacksonville State in 2000, the same year his dad hired Brey. More than 22 years later and 742 games into his Notre Dame tenure, Brey will coach against him for the first time.
“That’s a really interesting dynamic,” Brey said. “I’ve gotten to know him by way of Kevin. I have the utmost respect for him. He’s one of the good guys in the profession. But that will be a little weird.
“I have a feeling Kevin White will be sitting behind the Georgia bench on Sunday.”
Brey’s July 2000 hire changed Notre Dame basketball’s trajectory and that of the two men involved. Brey ended the Irish’s 11-year NCAA Tournament drought in his first season and is the program’s all-time wins leader. Kevin White, himself hired at Notre Dame just four months before he chose Brey, spent eight years in South Bend before going to Duke. It might be the most successful and impactful coaching decision of his 40 years as an athletics director.
“Arguably his greatest hire of his incredible career,” the younger White told reporters this week.
White and Brey became friends in the way many coaches do: time together in gyms at AAU tournaments and at the coach’s convention during the Final Four. They’ve watched the same recruits from the same coach seating sections and had drinks at the same hotel bars after AAU games are over. White became a head coach before the 2011-12 season at Louisiana Tech and left for Florida in 2015.
Georgia hired White in April after he had a 142-88 record in seven seasons with the Gators, the last of which ended without an NCAA tournament bid.
“Always spent a lot of time with him on the road,” Brey said. “He did an unbelievable job at Louisiana Tech, which is a hard job. Probably made a smart business move this spring re-inventing himself at Georgia.”
The White family ties to Notre Dame nearly extended to Mike. The Irish, then led by head coach John MacLeod, recruited Mike as a high school prospect out of New Orleans’ Jesuit High School in the 1995 cycle.
“He was a really good player and really wanted to come here,” Brey said. “We signed Doug Gottlieb. Obviously, the White family loves Notre Dame. But he was a really good guard. Of course, it worked out great. He had a great career at Ole Miss.”
Mike’s two brothers lived that dream, in a way. Danny White, now the athletics director at Tennessee, played for Brey and the Irish as a walk-on in 2001-02. Brian White, the Florida Atlantic athletics director, is a 2006 Notre Dame graduate.
The muti-generational family ties are thick. Notre Dame helped shape Kevin White’s career and his sons’ lives. Rooting against it Sunday – and against Brey – will surely be weird for him too.
Notre Dame (7-3, 0-1 ACC) vs. Georgia (7-3)
When: Sunday, Dec. 18 at 5:30 p.m. ET
Where: State Farm Arena, Atlanta
TV: ESPN2
Last meeting: Georgia won 61-57 on Nov. 22, 2011 in Kansas City, Mo.
Series history: Notre Dame leads 2-1
KenPom prediction: Notre Dame 67, Georgia 66
Leading scorers:
• Notre Dame: Forward Nate Laszewski (14.3 ppg), guard Dane Goodwin (13.7 ppg)
• Georgia: Guard Terry Roberts (14.2 ppg), guard Kario Oquendo (13.9 ppg)
Other notes:
• Georgia was 6-26 last season and won fewer games than all but one team from the Power Five conferences or the Big East. Only four scholarship players from the 2021-22 team returned for 2022-23.
• The Bulldogs are the No. 108 team in the KenPom rankings. They have not beaten a team ranked inside the top 230. Their three losses are to No. 95 Wake Forest, No. 46 UAB and No. 119 Georgia Tech.
• Notre Dame is No. 200 in adjusted defensive efficiency, per KenPom. The Irish are allowing opponents to shoot 51.6 percent inside the 3-point arc, which ranks 238th nationally.
“We’ve got to compete,” Brey said Friday. “I’d like to see us stick our nose in there [in practice] a little bit today and tomorrow before we head to Georgia because I don’t think we did that real well [in the Marquette game].”
• Notre Dame is 2-0 after a loss this year. It last played Dec. 11, a 79-64 home defeat against Marquette.
