Notebook: Tuesday With Mike Brey

Notre Dame head coach Mike Brey met with the media on Tuesday in preparation for his team’s Sweet 16 matchup versus Wisconsin in Philadelphia on Friday.

Here are three takeaways from his most notable comments.

Rare Company

Besides Notre Dame, only five schools — Duke, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Gonzaga and Oklahoma — have earned back-to-back Sweet 16 appearances the last two seasons.

That is quite a short list to check in on for Mike Brey and the Irish. Schools that have landed more highly touted recruiting classes in recent years, such as Kentucky, Kansas and Arizona cannot make such a claim.

However, recruiting rankings don’t always correlate with talent (even if they generally do). Nobody was projecting former Irish stars Jerian Grant and Pat Connaughton to the NBA out of high school, yet both are active in the league with the New York Knicks and Portland Trailblazers, respectively.

The success of that duo is certainly a credit to Brey and his staff’s player development. Star junior guard Demetrius Jackson was a high four-star recruit and McDonald’s All-American, so he has panned out about as expected.

Notre Dame’s head coach largely attributes landing that potent core (among others) as to why he won six NCAA Tournament games in his first 14 seasons, but has won five in the last two years, with more still on the table in the Sweet 16 this weekend in Philadelphia.

“We’ve had a year of having some pros two years in a row,” he said. “Talent has a lot to do with that.

“I’m a believer that thing is a little bit of a crapshoot, and the law of averages can come around and help you. But there’s no question that our talent level has been higher recently.”

Leaving An Imprint

Notre Dame fans will talk about last season’s team for many years to come. That squad finished 32-6 overall, defeated Duke and North Carolina en route to winning the ACC Tournament title, and advanced to the Elite Eight before falling just short of a Final Four bid with a 68-66 loss to No. 1-seeded and then-unbeaten Kentucky.

Several standouts on the 2015-16 crew were a huge part of that run — Jackson, senior forward Zach Auguste and junior guard Steve Vasturia, among others.

But that team was not theirs, so to speak, regardless of how much their contributions mattered. People will always remember that as Grant and Connaughton’s squad.

Making the Sweet 16 this year again — with potentially more to come — gives this nucleus a chance to leave their own mark in Irish fans minds, and the record books.

“This is a group that wanted to distance themselves from last year’s team and have their own identity,” Brey said. “And I give them a lot of credit because last year’s team had no expectations after going 15-17.

“They could just play and develop, and everything they did was gravy last year. This group had that hanging on their shoulder the whole time and to get to this point, fighting through that and having some tough times, especially losing two in Orlando and kind of being written off, I give them a lot of credit. And I give a lot of credit to our leadership.”

Record Territory For Auguste

Brey has been tooting the horn of his senior big man for weeks, and those claims were backed up in the first and second rounds of the NCAA Tournament.

Auguste scored 10 points on 4-of-5 shooting in the 70-63 win over Michigan on Friday, then finished with 16 points on 8-of-9 shooting in the 76-75 victory against Stephen F. Austin on Sunday.

Those two games have positioned the Marlborough, Mass., native into some nearly unheard of territory entering the Sweet 16. He’s now made 43 of his 61 field goal attempts in seven career NCAA Tournament games, which is a 70.5 percent clip.

Seventy attempts is the minimum to make it official in the NCAA record books, but if Auguste gets just nine more tries and stays on his current trajectory, he could break the NCAA record held by former UCLA star Bill Walton (68.6 percent).

“He flat-out believes on this NCAA Tournament stage,” Brey said. “I can’t believe there’s been a player in Notre Dame history that’s been more effective, more efficient. I don’t know all the stats of guys previously, but this guy really delivers and he loves bright lights and big games.

“To be mentioned up there that he can maybe break Walton’s record? That says it right there. Enough said.”