Jack Swarbrick was a great athletic director, and it might be best for Notre Dame that he’s moving on.
Swarbrick indisputably succeeded as AD at Notre Dame, because Swarbrick achieved the most important thing the athletic director can do: He preserved Notre Dame’s independence in college football while maintaining an attainable path to the national championship. The program isn’t ready to take that path yet, but the path is there, and that’s thanks to Swarbrick’s diplomacy with SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and former Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby.
Swarbrick did more than that, too.
Notre Dame’s non-football sports fell upward after the Big East dissolution thanks to Swarbrick navigating a place for them in the ACC. Notre Dame won ten national championships under Swarbrick, three in sports with 200 or more Division I teams. The women’s basketball program landed on its feet after Muffet McGraw retired. The baseball program climbed in national relevancy. Very few teams at the school, if any, are routinely worse than they were when Swarbrick took over. Campus Crossroads? It turned out well, successfully converting donor support for football into resources for academic departments and student life.
Swarbrick’s tenure was not without its terrible mistakes. Declan Sullivan died the most preventable of deaths on Jack Swarbrick’s watch. Debate the facts of the Prince Shembo case and Lizzy Seeberg’s death all you want, but the university approached the investigation terribly from even a competence standpoint, and Swarbrick was a major and relevant figure in university leadership at the time. On a much, much smaller scale, Notre Dame probably could have saved Manti Te’o some ridicule had it gotten ahead of the Lennay Kekua story instead of letting it be told first by the same smut bloggers who published Brett Favre’s dick pics. These mistakes are weighty and not to be swept under the rug. They were also in a different category from the core of Swarbrick’s job. They reflect more on Swarbrick as a person than on Swarbrick as an athletic director.
Swarbrick worked at a time when the role of athletic director was the biggest it’s ever been. It will get bigger from here, it would seem, but the world Pete Bevacqua inherits doesn’t change how much bigger Swarbrick’s South Bend job was than Kevin White’s. The college athletic director today is, for better or worse, a shepherd of an American tribe, one of a handful of people responsible for keeping their university prominent athletically and doing so in a fashion which meshes with the identity of the school. For Notre Dame, this job is particularly weighty, because Notre Dame is both a very large brand and a unique one. Notre Dame’s identity rests more on its conference affiliation than any other school in the country. Rather, it rests on its lack thereof. The thing that built Notre Dame was barnstorming, dodging Michigan’s racial and religious bigotry by playing Southern Cal in Los Angeles and Army in New York City. Independence is vital to Notre Dame being who it is, and Jack Swarbrick preserved that at a time in history when it was the hardest it’s ever been to pull it off.
How Does Pete Bevacqua Feel About NIL?
To the extent that we can use this word, there are two existential matters currently on new athletic director Pete Bevacqua’s plate. They are wholly different beasts, but the first is immediate and it’s irreversible, and it’s an area where Pete Bevacqua should be uniquely useful.
Notre Dame needs to sign its new contract with NBC.
The NBC contract is the main financial artery of the athletic department, and the current negotiation is one where it’s essential Notre Dame keep up, to the extent possible, with the Big Ten and the SEC. Who better to get every possible dollar, then, than the outgoing chairman of NBC Sports Group?
We’ll find out what other qualifications Bevacqua has, but at the very least, he brings very specific, very important knowledge with him as he moves back to Indiana.
The second matter is grayer, and it’s longer-term. Notre Dame needs to figure out how to compete in the age of NIL.
This is a learning environment, because the NIL world is still far from finding its steady state. Performing well in recruiting now is important, but as frustrating as it would be to go back to winning six to eight games a year for a while, NIL failures during this state of upheaval are probably not existential.
What is existential is how Notre Dame operates once the steady state arrives. Fr. Jenkins has signaled—and Swarbrick joined him on this—that Notre Dame doesn’t want college athletes to capture their full market value. It’s more nuanced than this, they have some good points, but that was their general position on the matter. If taken to its logical conclusion, this would lead to Notre Dame perpetually boxing out boosters who want to directly pay top talent to come to Notre Dame. It’s possible this will be fine in the eventual steady state. It’s more likely this will leave Notre Dame where Notre Dame has lately been—a top 25 program, but incapable of becoming the best football team in the country. (We’re focusing on football because 1. That’s where Notre Dame needs to win to be legitimate overall and 2. On the basketball side, NIL is a smaller deal for winning titles, and it’s not really a deal at all once you get past men’s and women’s hoops on the revenue leaderboard.)
It’s possible Jenkins will retire soon himself, the priest four months older than Swarbrick and famously seeming more keen on philosophy than university governance (I’d guess this was part of what drew the Congregation of Holy Cross’s leaders to place him in the job). It’s also possible Jenkins will see the steady state and relent. The guy does love to be in the room, so to speak, and I’m not even talking about the mask incident.
Regardless, few things will more definitely play a role in whether Notre Dame can return to the mountaintop under Pete Bevacqua than how Pete Bevacqua feels, conceptually, about NIL. How he actually handles it will be important too, of course, but the seed of it all is where his ideals lie. Does he like tradition? Does he like player empowerment? Does he feel a sacred call to educate? Does he see morality in a free market?
We’ll be listening.
Jimmy Dunne: Notre Dame Man
There are 41 trustees at Notre Dame, and one of them is Jimmy Dunne, the guy who brokered the PGA Tour’s deal with LIV and then said he’d kill any Saudis he’d been working with who he found out had been involved in 9/11.
The quote wasn’t as ridiculous as it first sounded. Dunne—I forgot this—lost 68 coworkers in the attack on the World Trade Center, absent from the office himself that day because he was trying to qualify for the U.S. Mid-Amateur golf tournament. As a senior managing partner of his firm, Dunne went on to, among other things, create a college scholarship fund which will soon complete its purpose of providing full tuition for all children of the 68 who died. You can find more about his story elsewhere, but the short version is: He has a direct enough tie to September 11th that it’s not absurd for him to view it as life and death and think about it every single day. It was life and death for him. It was more trauma for him than most of us will ever experience.
Still: I have no way of knowing whether Dunne is right about the innocence of his Saudi contacts, and whether he is or isn’t, I’m not sure I love having a Notre Dame trustee make the news for being the architect of a golf business deal with a government that, 9/11 aside, does some terrible, terrible stuff. I don’t know Dunne personally, and I only peripherally knew one of his kids. I’m told he’s a good guy. I was told otherwise about one of his children, but that child was 19 at the time of the incident, which is young. I don’t want Notre Dame to be trying to control its trustees, but it does say something about the university that one of its trustees is doing golf business deals with “the Saudis.” I don’t particularly like what it says.
Quick(er) Hitters
They’re replacing the floor at the Joyce Center. Not just the court, either! Digging all the way down. Per Chuck Freeby, it’s so the floor can come apart for events.
This Week
Olivia Markezich won the national championship in women’s steeplechase this weekend here in Austin, winning by 5.82 seconds with a time of 9:25.03.
Markezich was Notre Dame’s only champion, but Jadin O’Brien (heptathlon), John Keenan (javelin), and Carter Solomon) all finished as All-Americans. The women’s team finished tied for 22nd in the country. The men finished tied for 47th.
With that, Notre Dame’s athletic season for the academic year concludes. Fall sport schedules aren’t out yet, besides football, so we don’t know when the next competition comes.
“Notre Dame doesn’t want college athletes to capture their full market value.” More nuanced than this or not, I’m skeptical of this premise. For starters, it presupposes that “full market value” is a known quantity, and I doubt that there will be much consensus on this even when we reach the steady state you mention. Right now, a player’s market value is as volatile as the market value of an average dot-com startup in 1999.
So, unless you have direct quotes from Swarbrick or Jenkins attesting to this position — and I can’t imagine you would decline to use such quotes if you have them — then I can’t see that this assertion is anything but speculation.
Hi Bob, thanks for the comment. Swarbrick and Jenkins’s stances on NIL are something we covered in April (https://thebarkingcrow.com/good-things-shrewing-our-new-notre-dame-coverage/), and we’ve covered Notre Dame’s NIL approach in a few other places these last few months, so I didn’t want to rehash all of that here in too much detail, in the interest of giving more time and space to Swarbrick’s legacy, our impressions of Bevacqua, etc. As for direct evidence, though:
In their March op-ed for the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/23/opinion/college-sports-student-athletes-education.html), Swarbrick and Jenkins wrote, “We must establish and enforce regulations that allow legitimate transactions while barring those that are recruiting enticements or pay-for-play.”
Whether this means Swarbrick and Jenkins do or don’t want athletes to capture their “full market value” is open for debate. I would guess they would disagree with me in that debate – they’ve been nominally supportive of true ‘name, image, likeness’ marketing deals even if Notre Dame has done less than other Power Five schools to facilitate those for its athletes. Definitionally, though, if a lot of people are willing to pay for a good or service, that’s a market, which means pay-for-play, whether we like it or not, is a market.
Practically speaking, even if we all were to agree that pay-for-play isn’t a market we want, the NCAA doesn’t have the resources to police it effectively in a precise manner, which means that, if answered, calls like those from Swarbrick and Jenkins to crack down will limit true ‘name, image, likeness’ deals as well. There’s too much gray area inherent.
So, that’s where we’re coming from when we say that Jenkins and Swarbrick have signaled opposition to athletes capturing their full market value. It’s a dynamic situation, and we’re trying to figure it out ourselves (in one of the posts linked below, I said NIL was most important in men’s basketball, which is no longer something I believe). But that’s our interpretation right now of what they’ve said and done.
A few other relevant posts (we may have talked more about it in other editions of Good Things Shrewing, but these are where we’ve talked about it the most):
https://thebarkingcrow.com/whats-the-status-of-nil-at-notre-dame/
https://thebarkingcrow.com/shrewsberry-swarbrick-and-nil/
https://thebarkingcrow.com/good-things-shrewing-the-shoe-deal-idea/