The NCAA athletic year begins today, at least by one definition. Most Division I women’s soccer teams begin play tonight, and for most D-I schools, women’s soccer is the first season to kick off. So, while we’ll have plenty on football over the weeks ahead, it’s only getting a quick mention this afternoon. In fact, we almost led with soccer, which at Notre Dame more than deserves any love that it gets. But, there was this announcement from Peacock yesterday, and…
Hold on.
Wait a second.
Swimming????
They Were Running a Sports Book
Welp:
Notre Dame is suspending its men’s swimming program for a minimum of one academic year after internal and external investigations revealed a widespread gambling issue that violated NCAA rules, and what athletic director Pete Bevacqua termed in a statement, “a deeply embedded team culture dismissive of Notre Dame’s standards for student-athletes.”
That’s Pat Forde reporting for Sports Illustrated. Here’s Bevacqua’s statement. Evidently the men’s swim team was running an effective sports book in which athletes were gambling on their own meets. Forde names over/unders as the market, which makes me assume they were betting on their teammates’ times?
Bevacqua’s statement mentions that the team didn’t meet Notre Dame’s “expectation that they treat one another with dignity and respect.” Forde reports that this references a group chat and that there was no evidence of physical abuse. Maybe the group chat was really rancid, but it sounds like the suspension is more about gambling than hazing. That is good.
Other details:
- The men’s diving team will continue to compete this year, as will the women’s swimming and diving teams.
- No coaching staff will be disciplined. Per Bevacqua’s statement, the staff “participated in and fully cooperated with all aspects of the external review,” and while the staff was unaware of the gambling and some issues, they appropriately handled all issues they did know about.
- Yes, swimmers can transfer. Everyone can transfer. It is 2024. Everyone can always transfer. I don’t know who can and can’t compete right away, and if they gambled, NCAA discipline will follow them, but they can transfer.
- Forde reports that Chris Guiliano, rising senior and double Olympic medalist, didn’t place bets. Per a source. (If I were a source, I would say that too, but it might be true! Guiliano had good reason to take his swimming career much more seriously than everybody else.)
Having seen the Iowa and Iowa State sports gambling scandal play out, it’s fair for Notre Dame to treat this aggressively. It’s highly doubtful these guys were rigging competition, which makes the gambling offense utterly and completely harmless, but the point of enforcing gambling punishments aggressively is that it will hopefully keep match-fixing from ever becoming a possibility. Is a full-season suspension necessary? I don’t know. But it’s better for Notre Dame to be too harsh than too lenient in the eyes of law enforcement and the NCAA. Make an example out of the men’s swim team. It might not be perfectly fair, but it’s better than inviting someone else to investigate every single sport on campus.
On that note: How did Notre Dame not make it sufficiently clear to its athletes that they could in no form gamble on college sports? Goodness.
This is sad, of course, because college athletes’ careers are getting wrecked by it. It’s also disappointing for Notre Dame’s athletic department, for whom men’s swimming was a rising star of a program. Third-year coach Chris Lindauer was spectacular in Year 2. Will he stick around? Have we seen the last of Guiliano in blue and gold?
If Lindauer does stay in South Bend, one would imagine the program’s recovery should come pretty quickly. He’s still a stud of a coach, and gambling should be a much lesser red flag for athletes and their parents than severe hazing would have been. Notre Dame men’s swimming should bounce back, and if Lindauer gets to build his preferred culture from scratch, that’s a reason to believe it’ll be stronger than it was before. If Lindauer stays. If he leaves, it’s back to square one.
It’s a bad day for a lot of people. The positive spin is that we were bracing ourselves for an ugly hazing revelation, and instead we found out these guys were just gambling on each other’s times. In that sense, this is a relief.
Notre Dame and Peacock
Back to football:
What you’re watching there is the trailer for a Peacock docuseries covering Notre Dame’s 2024 (hopefully 2024–25) football season. The first two episodes will air on Thursday, August 29th. The next two won’t air until December 5th, three days before the playoff selection show. Episodes five and six will air on December 19th, hopefully on the eve of a first-round playoff game at Notre Dame Stadium. The final episode is scheduled to air four days before the national championship, though I’m sure Peacock would be happy to add a bonus feature if the Irish are still playing football in the back half of January.
College football docuseries aren’t a new concept. LSU made one in 2022 following Brian Kelly’s first year. Showtime made one following Notre Dame in 2015. Plenty of other programs have received this treatment.
Still, Peacock is a fairly premium place for this kind of content. It’s in the sweet spot where a lot of college football fans have the subscription (Peacock will stream at least nine games this year, including the Apple Cup and Boise State vs. Oregon) but few will hate-watch in the event Notre Dame isn’t good. If Notre Dame flops, this won’t amplify the criticism. If Notre Dame succeeds, this could reach a national audience. Meanwhile, Marcus Freeman gets to point out the NBC cameras to every recruit who makes an official visit this fall.
The pitch accompanying Bevacqua’s hire was that he’d leverage Notre Dame’s NBC partnership better than anyone else could. Mostly, this was code for “he’ll get every cent Notre Dame can get in TV negotiations,” but it also applies to projects like this one. Here comes Here Comes the Irish. It can’t hurt.
Soccer Kicks Off
Considering how few schools sponsor fencing and men’s lacrosse, I’m not sure there’s a sport where Notre Dame’s as successful across genders as the Irish are in soccer. Last year’s women’s team finished second in the ACC and earned a 3-seed* in the NCAA Tournament, where they lost in the second round to Memphis. The men’s team was the only unbeaten ACC team in conference play and made it all the way to the national championship before falling to Clemson.
Expectations this year are for similar results. The men open the season second to Clemson in the national coaches poll. The women are ranked 15th. In the ACC, men’s coaches voted the Irish again second to Clemson, though no one gave Notre Dame a first-place vote (UNC and Wake Forest combined for three). The women were picked to finish third, trailing Florida State and new ACC member Stanford.
On the individual level, the men will miss first team All-American goalie Bryan Dowd, who’s on to the MLS. Owen Cornell, a junior, played the one game Dowd didn’t last year, but Simone Baravelli, a senior from Italy, is the other keeper listed on the roster. I don’t know whether one or the other has the edge for the starting job. Seniors Kyle Genenbacher (defense) and Matthew Roou (forward) made the United Soccer Coaches’ “players to watch” lists, as did junior midfielder Bryce Boneau. Roou was the team’s second-leading scorer last year behind Eno Nto, who like Dowd has moved on.
For the women, All-American defender Eva Gaetino is on to a professional career in France. The Irish will also have to replace all three of their leading scorers, with Maddie Mercado and Kiki Van Zanten into the NWSL while Kristina Lynch is playing in the W League. Junior midfielder Leah Klenke was named preseason all-ACC, but she’ll be gone for most of August and September representing America in the U20 World Cup.
At a high level, the goal for the men is clearly the program’s second national championship and first under Chad Riley. For the women, it’s hard to ask for more than a top-three ACC finish and another top-four seed* nationally. If the program can reach the round of 16, it’ll be a job well done.
*In women’s soccer, the NCAA Tournament is 64 teams, with seedings broken out by region like they are in men’s basketball.
Irish in Europe (As Is Natural)
In addition to the Olympians, whom we’ll get to in a moment, the men’s basketball program spent some of August on the other side of the Atlantic, playing three exhibition games in Spain. The Irish won all three, and Markus Burton put up big numbers, but it’s hard to find much meaning in these offseason international tours. One fun thing: Notre Dame put together a lot of content around the trip, which has been a nice way to get to know the players. You can find most of it on the ND men’s basketball site.
As for those Olympians…
Five Notre Dame athletes won gold, including Jewell Lloyd (basketball), Jackie Young (basketball), Korbin Albert (soccer), Lee Kiefer (fencing x2), and Guiliano (swimming). Three more won bronze, and with Guiliano adding a silver, Notre Dame’s total medal count was nine, counted as they count it for countries (you can’t count basketball twice).
Quick(er) Hitters
The two big things with the football program right now are Charles Jagusah’s injury and Deuce Knight’s recruitment status. Jagusah, a sophomore left tackle who was supposed to be a monster, tore his pec and is out for the year. Knight, a composite five-star quarterback out of Lucedale, Mississippi, is still a Notre Dame commit but is reportedly under heavy pursuit from Auburn.
Jagusah’s injury is the bigger problem. Offensive lines are more important than quarterbacks in college football, and while left tackle only comprises one fifth of the position group, it’s the most important fifth. Thankfully, Notre Dame does have options, and while the hype around Jagusah was massive, he wasn’t yet proven. From the sounds of it, the starter in College Station will either be fifth-year Tosh Baker, who has starting experience, or freshman Anthonie Knapp, a composite four-star from the Atlanta suburbs. It’s probably fair to view this as a floor vs. ceiling decision. I don’t know that either is necessarily less of a false start risk than Jagusah would have been, so don’t get too focused on that in two weeks. It’s more about what they do to Texas A&M defenders.
With Knight, the concern is frustrating, but this is the territory Notre Dame needs to be in. The only teams who’ve won recent national championships have either been loaded with five-stars or built around an offensive line that would have aged out of college football without Covid. Notre Dame needs five-stars, and while a bigger deal is made of college quarterbacks than is warranted, quarterbacks are obviously a big deal. The rumor tide’s shifted back in Notre Dame’s direction—there was a report that Auburn wanted Knight to flip last week and that he wasn’t fully sold—but this is going to continue to be a story until Knight either flips or signs. Hopefully, Signing Day will come and Deuce Knight will be a Notre Dame quarterback.
One bright side? There are indications (one is named Riley Leonard, another is named Sam Hartman) that Notre Dame’s NIL backers want to spend a lot on quarterbacks. We have our doubts about how competitive Notre Dame is overall in the NIL space, but we’re a lot less concerned about getting outbid for a five-star quarterback than we are with a four-star linebacker.
Elsewhere, the Big Ten announced its Wrigley Field hockey matchups today. Notre Dame will play Penn State outside at the federal landmark on Friday, January 3rd.
This Week
Over the next seven days…
Women’s soccer opens tonight against Michigan State, a fellow top-15 team. The game’s in South Bend, kicking off at 7 PM Eastern. It’ll be streamed on ACC Network Extra and ESPN+. On Sunday, the Irish travel to Birmingham to play Samford. I haven’t seen broadcast information for that one, but kickoff’s at 6 PM Eastern.
The volleyball team plays an exhibition on Wednesday against Michigan State at home in South Bend. Men’s soccer plays an exhibition Saturday against Creighton. Much more to come next week. We’re still figuring out our football season schedule (and will probably continue to figure it out as football begins), but for the time being, we’re aiming to have Good Things Shrewing up again next Thursday. That’s the over/under, for any swimmers with newfound time on their hands.
