SOUTH BEND, Ind. — It is still annoyingly necessary in any conversation of substance about even the near future of a college athletics team to frame it with a reference to federal judge Claudia Wilken.
Or risk being perceived as a word-salad spinner.
Take the introductory press conference on Thursday of new Notre Dame men’s and women’s basketball general manager Pat Garrity.
The 48-year-old former Irish hoops All-American was able to rattle off some semblance of an immediate to-do list — including giving his son and ND football walk-on tight end Henry Garrity some courtesy space from his parents’ move 3 ½ hours closer. But long-term, Pat Garrity and the rest of the college sports world are stuck talking and thinking in shades of gray instead of forging ahead with actual gray matter.
Until Wilken rules on the House v. NCAA settlement, which could be any day now.
That’s not to say how and when she rules is the final word on where college sports is headed. But it’s both a workable GPS and template that will be challenged in court and that will likely evolve for Garrity and others — including men’s head basketball coach Micah Shrewsberry and his Irish women’s basketball coaching counterpart, Niele Ivey, both of whom attended the Garrity/media meet-and-greet at Notre Dame Stadium.
“We’re hoping that it brings stability,” Ivey said of Wilken’s eventual ruling. “Like this past offseason, it has been kind of the wild, wild west. And having that structure with Pat here, it’s a new normal for us. It’s a new landscape.
“We’re hoping it provides that structure that we need, because all coaches are in a space that we’ve never been in before.”
And so, while Garrity might publicly project what his job will look like in at least some concrete terms, being able to adapt to a world that might look drastically different a year from now and helping those around him thrive in it is the unspoken part of his job description.
Although it was certainly implied intermittently on Thursday.
“If we ever get to the point where there are rules and transparencies that we all understand,” Garrity prefaced in trying to draw some usable parallels between the financial side of roster construction/retention in his new job at Notre Dame and some old front-office roles with the NBA’s Detroit Pistons.
Even without the college sports universe’s current and imminent mega-morphing, there’s elements of Garrity’s job that would have to evolve anyway, because sports evolve, and in basketball that’s on and off the court.
Here are some key dynamics in how the GM job looks now and what it might grow into:
1. Goal-setting for the programs, and finding the best way on how to get there.
“We already started talking strategy of, ‘This is who our team looks like. This is who we’re recruiting.’” Shrewsberry offered. “But there are a lot of things that we’re going to start to kind of get to work on — short-term and long-term goals.”
That includes the aforementioned roster-construction, but also coaching analytics, scouting and evaluation, recruiting philosophies and just plain old basketball.
“You’re trying to build your program in the best way possible,” Shrewsberry said. “I think all of our expertise is good. But ours [Ivey’s and Shrewsberry’s] was on the coaching side. His was on the front-office side. So, now being able to combine those two things I think will be great for all of us.”
2. Avoiding surprises, like four women’s basketball players hitting the transfer portal right after a run to the NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 and less than six weeks after the team was sitting in the top spot in both major polls.
Not all of the four voluntary women’s basketball departures were shocking, but freshman Kate Koval’s defection to LSU was particularly a blind-sider. And Notre Dame was far from alone. A Final Four UCLA team lost six transfers — all to power conference schools — including four freshmen.
And then there’s the logistical and financial part of replacing those players.
Garrity’s mantra is recruiting players in the first place who value long-term player development, but it goes deeper. And his NBA front-office experience helps in some parts of that and in others does not.
“I think one similarity is when you’re looking at your cap sheet and preparing for free agency or trades, you’re running a lot of different scenarios, and none of them turn out. You end up going down a path that you hadn’t planned for. I think that’s a little bit of a reality.
“The different thing here is that it’s really hard to plan past one year, because we don’t have multi-year deals. There’s no restricted free agency. The ability to retain players is just totally different than pro sports.”
But a big part of successful roster management is being a great communicator.
“You’re having conversations with agents and parents,” Garrity said, “and figuring out who’s at risk for leaving and where you potentially need to shore up your roster and that kind of thing.”
3 Giving the coaches more time to be coaches and taking some of their growing list of headaches away.
Garrity has a strong history of working with NBA elite-level sports performance teams to help players avoid and/or mitigate injuries and maximize their play. He can take the lead there. Same with coaching analytics, another areas of his expertise.
He understands the financial dynamics and also how those can affect team chemistry. Where he admitted he needed to get up to speed is undestanding some of the nuances of being a sports administrator, like the newest NCAA rulebook.
Will he be involved in recruiting? On campus? Yes. Philosophically? Yes. On the road like Chad Bowden sometimes did in his football GM role and new football GM Mike Martin may do? Nope.
“Our administration is … now really kind of showing that outside-the-box thinking to add somebody like Pat,” Shrewsberry summarized. “To help really kind of guide us into the future of what we need to be successful. Getting up to speed knowing what we’re doing, but knowing what others are doing, so we stay in line with the teams in our league and across the country.”
4 Leading by example.
And a lot of that equity is already in the bank and growing. Who Pat Garrity the Notre Dame student, the Notre Dame basketball player became is the equivalent of a viral TikTok video extolling why the ND path makes sense for the college years and beyond.
“His success here at Notre Dame, understanding Notre Dame and the [new] landscape is going to be huge to have another voice,” Ivey said. “Somebody, again, with that experience. Somebody who really understands what we’re dealing with, being a student-athlete here. And his passion for the university. So, we’re super excited to have him part of our family.”
As Garrity looked out over a packed media gathering Thursday, his excitement to be back too was palpable.
“I didn’t know what kind of turnout we were going to get in late May, cold weather,” he said with a big smile, “so it’s good to see this is a basketball school.”
