ALTOONA, Pa. -- Well, this sucks!
We had a nice three-week run of Penn State basketball being relevant and fun and promising and ...
Oh well. It's over.
Because, repeat after me: Penn State basketball just can't have nice things.
Micah Shrewsberry is leaving for Notre Dame. Penn State will now be in a complete and total rebuild with a new coach. And there are no guarantees the Nittany Lions will be relevant again for, I don't know, probably several years.
OK, so who's to blame here? That's what everybody wants to do, right? Blame somebody when something doesn't go your way?
If there truly is one person to blame, here's my pick: Mike Brey.
Why the hell did the longtime successful Notre Dame basketball coach have to pick this particular season to be absolutely terrible? The Fighting Irish were in the NCAA Tournament last season, Brey's 13th appearance in his 23 years there, but collapsed this season and went 3-17 in the ACC, 11-21 overall.
Brey was forced out, so Notre Dame needed a new coach.
Now, that is just absolutely terrible luck for Penn State. Because it opened up one of the jobs that would be an absolutely perfect fit for Shrewsberry, and he really just had to take it.
If Notre Dame had struggled next year instead under Brey, well, Shrewsberry already would have been locked up with a new contract at Penn State.
Bad timing. Bad luck. Bad for everybody at Penn State.
But good for Shrewsberry.
The guy is from Indiana. He's spent 36 of his 46 years on this planet living in, playing and coaching basketball in Indiana. His first head coaching job was at IU South Bend, for crying out loud, which obviously is in the same city as Notre Dame.
This, my friends, was fate.
THAT is what we have to blame.
The damn stars aligned to create an opening that was too good for this particular coach to pass up at this particular time.
There are people out there blaming Penn State AD Patrick Kraft. That seems like complete nonsense to me.
There are people out there blaming Penn State in general, for not making a full commitment to basketball. Again, I disagree.
Notre Dame reportedly is giving Shrewsberry a seven-year contract, which is extremely impressive. A school doesn't do that with a coach unless it really, really wants him.
I don't know the numbers Kraft and Penn State were throwing at Shrewsberry trying to convince him to stay. Maybe the numbers will be revealed through inside info or rumors at some point, but I have a feeling those numbers were probably pretty darn good. Really, really good considering Penn State's basketball history.
Did Kraft and the school offer Shrewsberry $3 million a year, up from the reported $2 million he makes now? Was the number even higher than that? Because I'm here to tell you, if Penn State was offering $3 million or more a year, I consider that a pretty good commitment from a school that was paying Patrick Chambers less than $1 million a year just six or seven years ago before finally (we think) bumping him above $1 million near the end of his tenure.
I wrote all of this just a couple of days ago, when I suggested that if Notre Dame really wants Shrewsberry, there's probably nothing Penn State can do.
That's what I think happened here. Maybe I'm wrong, and time will tell.
But what did people think Penn State was actually going to offer Shrewsberry? Something outrageous like $4 million a year? Let's be real here, people.
Penn State is a FOOOTBALL school! The football program has a chance to contend for a national championship in the next two years. The university is gonna have to spend half a billion dollars or more to upgrade the football stadium in the coming years.
There are limits, you know, in everything. And there are certainly limits to what the school realistically could pay any basketball coach, given its financial situation of having to support 31 Division I sports as a self-sustaining athletic department.
Penn State's basketball tradition also surely had something to do with this. Yeah, Shrewsberry got to the NCAA Tournament this year, but that doesn't change the fact that the program still doesn't have much tradition. Shrewsberry understands all that, and even if he is supremely confident in his coaching ability, he also has to understand the uphill challenges he would ALWAYS face at Penn State.
Penn State has made 10 NCAA Tournaments EVER. Notre Dame has made 37, and reached the Elite 8 in back-to-back years within the past decade. The Lions have made the Sweet 16 a grand total of once during the modern era of the tourney, and have never made it to the Elite 8 in the modern era.
Notre Dame is a football school, sure, but it's also a basketball school and has been for a long time.
You add all that up, plus the fact that this particular job opening is Notre Dame in Shrewsberry's home state, what was the guy supposed to do?
I felt all along that he'd be foolish to turn down Notre Dame in favor of Penn State.
He's not foolish.
Whether you agree or disagree with all of the above, the bottom line is this:
This sucks!
Because for the past three weeks, Penn State basketball had as much momentum as I can remember. There was tremendous optimism from everyone after getting to the Big Ten Tournament title game, earning an NCAA Tournament berth and then destroying Texas A&M in perhaps the best-played basketball game in Penn State history.
I make no bones about it, I've always wanted to see Penn State basketball be successful, in large part because I'm an enormous college basketball fan, and it's nice when the local team can be successful.
What Shrewsberry pulled off over the past few weeks was extremely impressive.
Let me repeat that: Extremely impressive.
But I feel like some people don't want to address one particular aspect of things because it doesn't fit the narrative of wanting to get caught up in the magic of the moment.
Which is ...
There's a good chance Shrewsberry and Penn State just got lucky. Call that being overly pessimistic if you want, but it's absolutely a possibility.
The team was 5-9 in the Big Ten. It was going nowhere. Shrewsberry made a big move going heavy to booty ball with the first AP All-American in program history in Jalen Pickett, and that move proved to be a stroke of genius as the Lions got really hot.
But is ANY of that repeatable going forward? Pickett's gone. Andrew Funk is gone. Camren Wynter is gone. Seth Lundy announced Wednesday that he's entering the NBA draft early. That's pretty much your entire team, with those four starters accounting for well more than 90 percent of the Lions' production.
Was Shrewsberry going to be able to catch lightning in a bottle again next year with an all-new starting lineup, save for Kebba Njie?
Let's just say I have my doubts.
Regardless, this still sucks!
Because for any questions we might have had about the future, the bottom line is that the optimism around the program -- created by Shrewsberry's success -- has been incredibly high in recent weeks. It will be very, very difficult to replace that, no matter who is hired as the next coach.
There's also fallout from this move, too.
The Lions will lose a good recruit in Braeden Shrewsberry, who almost certainly will follow his dad to Notre Dame. And other recruits may decide to avoid Penn State now, as well, and some current players may enter the transfer portal.
The collateral damage will be great, and about the only thing that will help things will be if the next coach is somehow able to land one or two studs from the portal, the way Shrewsberry did when he landed Pickett two years ago.
Here's what Kraft had to say in a university statement late Wednesday:
"This afternoon, Penn State Head Men’s Basketball Coach Micah Shrewsberry called to inform me that he was leaving the University to accept a position at another institution. We thank Micah for his contributions to the PSU community and wish him the very best. We are already moving forward in a search for a new head coach and will identify and appoint a tremendous coach, teacher and person, who will take us to unprecedented heights.
"We are so proud of our amazingly talented student-athletes and all they accomplished this year and will in the future. We are also so appreciative of our student body and our passionate fans who support our basketball program."
Ahhh, those passionate fans. There aren't many of them with Penn State basketball, but as we've seen in recent weeks, when things are going well in the program, the fan base expands and there's a lot of support.
But I know what the fans are thinking right now, and it makes perfect sense:
This sucks!
