Luck of Irish Could Turn in Big East : College basketball: Notre Dame’s move to conference next fall ‘a coup’ that could make team powerful again.

Notre Dame continues to muddle through in its last basketball season as an independent, neither power nor patsy, capable of mind-boggling victories and head-scratching losses, sometimes in the same week.

An overtime victory over Indiana 2 1/2 weeks ago was followed by a loss to San Diego in which the Irish trailed by 31 points at halftime.

It has been this way for more than four seasons now. The Irish, an almost-annual participant as recently as the late 1980s, made their last appearance in the NCAA tournament in 1990.

Notre Dame was 12-17 last season, 9-18 two seasons ago.

How to turn it around?

Curiously, Irish officials believe they found the elixir to revive their moribund basketball program last summer when they agreed to join the Big East Conference next fall in all sports except football.

The Big East, of course, ranks among the nation’s best in basketball, and the Notre Dame teams of the last few seasons probably would have struggled to compete.

But by aligning themselves with the conference, the Irish believe they have put a new face on their program that will attract a higher caliber of recruits.

“Being in a conference identifies us,” said Coach John MacLeod, who lobbied hard for the move. “Notre Dame itself doesn’t need identification, but Notre Dame basketball needs identification. We are identified now not as an independent, but as a Big East member.

“And this process of identification allows us to be recognized in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C.”

In other words, it gives Notre Dame higher visibility in areas that are major alumni bases and were once recruiting hot spots for the Irish. In the 1980s, the Big East and Atlantic Coast Conference took advantage of the emergence of ESPN to increase their television exposure, which helped them dominate the recruiting of top players.

By invitation, no less, the Irish believe they have been positioned to recapture their strongholds in the East. And as the only Big East member in the Midwest, they will be able to recruit more successfully against the Big Ten.

“There might be a downside, but if there is, I don’t know what it would be,” said MacLeod, who is 42-52 in more than three seasons at Notre Dame, including 3-2 this season. “The upside so far outweighs the downside and any negative that might be there.

“There are so many good things: We have a geographical turf from which to recruit, we have all kinds of great media exposure in the East. Now, we have to find out if we can handle it, and then grow into it.”

Already, there are indications that things are looking up.

Last month, Notre Dame signed four highly regarded recruits, including point guard Doug Gottlieb of Tustin High.

“It was a major, major influence on my decision,” Gottlieb said of the Irish’s move to the Big East. “If they had remained independent . . . It wasn’t just me--probably all the guys they signed wouldn’t have gone there.

“The Big East, if you finish in the top five or six, you’re in the (NCAA) tournament, and the Big East is on TV so much, all of a sudden, you have national exposure. It’s a completely different program.”

Gottlieb said he liked the Notre Dame coaches and their offensive system.

“And I think I’ve got a good chance to play a lot all four years,” he said.

But if the Irish hadn’t moved to the Big East?

“I’d probably be going to UCLA or Florida,” he said.

MacLeod grew tired of hearing such comments.

“I won’t be specific and tell you who, but we lost two or three players simply because we weren’t in a conference,” he said.

As one of the last remaining independents, Notre Dame has had to settle for whatever it could get in scheduling, which meant playing top teams at their convenience. And if the Irish struggled, they had little to play for at the end of the season.

“The thing being in a conference does . . . Let’s say you have a team that has young players, new players or players who are hurt and your team hasn’t jelled,” MacLeod said. “Let’s say your young players begin to jell at the end of the year, your injured players get back and, all of a sudden, in the last four weeks of the season, you start to take off.

“You don’t have a glossy record, but you’re going to a (conference) tournament and, by golly, you win it because you’re on fire going down to the wire, and it puts you into the NCAA tournament.

“We could catch fire as an independent and it doesn’t make any difference.”

MacLeod discovered this painful truth after the 1991-92 season, his first in South Bend after 18 seasons in the NBA.

“We were 14-14 and played the toughest schedule in the country,” said MacLeod, whose team was 7-11 at the season’s low point. “We beat Syracuse on the road, we beat North Carolina on the road (in New York), we beat UCLA, we beat Marquette twice, we beat DePaul.”

But it wasn’t enough to attract a bid to the NCAA tournament.

And teams that are not playing in March are soon forgotten by recruits, who began to cross Notre Dame off their lists.

Said MacLeod: “If you look at the teams that are strong, they’re the ones that are on TV in April: Duke, North Carolina, Arizona, Kentucky, Michigan, Arkansas, Florida now. These are teams that have had big runs and kids at home start to identify. They see themselves in those uniforms, playing on that team, in that conference, in the NCAA tournament.

“It has a strong bearing.”

Not long after the Irish ended their 1991-92 season in the championship game of the National Invitation Tournament, losing to Virginia, MacLeod began lobbying Irish officials to move into a conference, believing that it would give them a better chance at the NCAA tournament.

“It looked like the cards were stacked against being a successful program if you were not in a conference,” said MacLeod, who had seen the struggling Marquette and DePaul programs give up their independent status in recent years. “You just had too many things against you.

“Other recruiters would use it against us, and it’s a strong argument. And plus we had dipped. We hadn’t been doing too well the last two or three years, and that added credibility to what they were saying.”

Now they’re saying the Irish scored a coup.

Asked for an assessment of the Notre Dame-Big East alliance, Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim said last summer, “It’s certainly good for Notre Dame.”

Wrote Rich Hofmann of the Philadelphia Daily News after the announcement: “Cold sweat will soak the pillows of college basketball coaches all over the nation this evening. Short of an unexpected letter from the NCAA, their worst nightmare has become reality. Notre Dame not only joined a conference yesterday--it joined the Big East.

“Suddenly, no one’s recruits are safe.”

Former Providence Coach Rick Barnes, now at Clemson, said the move “immediately makes Notre Dame a top-five program.”

That would be fine with Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese, whose conference will now enjoy wider exposure in the big Chicago television market, which translates to increased revenue.

“We are both going to benefit,” Tranghese said. “Long term, this is a home run for our league.”

In the short term, will the Irish be able to compete?

“That’s going to be interesting,” MacLeod said. “We don’t know how we’re going to stack up. We think we’re going to be OK, but we don’t know. We know full well that Syracuse, Georgetown, Villanova--you can go down the list: Connecticut, St. John’s--these are traditionally powerful teams.

“It’s an excellent conference. So, there are a lot of questions. We don’t know exactly what’s going to happen.”