What Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick said about Irish independence on The Dan Patrick Show
On the Dan Patrick Show, broadcasting live from Dublin, Ireland, Wednesday, Notre Dame director of athletics Jack Swarbrick was asked at what point Fighting Irish football was the closest it has ever been to joining a conference. The answer was not any time in the last two years, when conference realignment has been most chaotic.
It was a decade ago when Notre Dame’s Olympic sports left the crumbling Big East for the Atlantic Coast Conference.
“I don’t know if it was particularly close, but if we hadn’t been able to find a home for our Olympic sports with the ACC, maintaining football independence would have been problematic,” Swarbrick told Patrick. “We needed a partner who would allow our Olympic sports to participate at the level we want them to.”
All these years later, the ACC is a conference on the ropes just like the Big East was back then. It’s not nearly as strong as the Big Ten or Southeastern Conference. That’s alarming for Notre Dame considering national powers like Irish lacrosse, basketball, soccer, etc. all compete in the ACC.
And then there’s Notre Dame, still riding the wave of independence.
Swarbrick told Patrick “all the major conferences are a possibility” when Patrick asked if Notre Dame might join the ACC as a football member at some point. It wasn’t a walking back of recent comments from him swearing by independence. Rather, it was an inferential admission that the landscape is ever-changing and that Notre Dame might one day need to join a conference.
When Patrick asked what it would take for the Irish to get there, Swarbrick said what he always has; the loss of a TV rights partner and a fair path to the College Football Playoff. How important is the first piece in that — the media agreement? Patrick asked Swarbrick point-blank where Notre Dame football would be without a favorable, fortuitous, profitable deal with NBC.
Patrick put it something like this: if NBC didn’t extend the current contract at a much higher price, would Notre Dame join a conference?
“If we didn’t have somebody else that was willing to step up, yes,” Swarbrick said.
Swarbrick called the current landscape of college sports “a complete disaster.” It’s money-grabbing that got it there. And, clearly, it’d be money that’d be the main culprit in ever pushing Notre Dame into a conference for football.
Patrick called it greed. Swarbrick said he wasn’t entirely comfortable with that classification. He did admit, though, that “it is all about money.”
“Everybody in the industry has to take responsibility here,” Swarbrick said. “I’m not excluding myself from that. I think the decision making has lost its way in terms of the focus on the student athlete and what’s primarily best for them. But we are where we are, and we have to try to make it work.”
