Editor’s Note: This is the final story in our four-part Big Picture Series that focuses on various aspects of the Notre Dame athletic program from the vantage point of Irish athletic director Jack Swarbrick.
PART I
State of the football program and the growth of first-year head coach Marcus Freeman
PART II
College sports’ emergence from pandemic abatement to pressure to join an arms race
PART III
ND’s evolution into a national baseball power and its commitment to its sustainability
► PART IV
ND’s place in the NIL space and navigating a rapidly evolving college sports model
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
He laughed.
Not in a condescending way, but as if Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick was responding to a punchline.
What was posed to the 14th-year Irish AD was actually a question about college sports’ new boogey man — name, image and likeness (NIL). Specifically, it was about how Swarbrick felt about the NCAA deciding last month to double down on the clarity of the NIL concept with reinforced guidelines that implied punishment would be forthcoming for those who didn’t readjust.
“It’s impossible to have any confidence in their ability to enforce them,” Swarbrick said of the NCAA, as he gathered himself. “I’d like to. That would be great. But I look at college basketball coming out of the situation (corruption scandal) involving the federal government and the southern district of New York, and it’s hard to have any confidence in the process right now.”
Essentially uneven and incomplete justice.
That’s not to say Swarbrick believes college athletics’ walk on the wildest of sides is interminable or incapable of morphing into something less chaotic, maybe even with a sense of a level playing field.
It’s just that he doesn’t see the NCAA as being part of the NIL solution.
Nor perhaps does he envision the NCAA being part of Division I football’s future for much longer.
“There’s certainly a very significant increase in the amount of discussion about it in the past 30 days (or so),” Swarbrick said. “Whether it occurs or not, there’s a lot more interest in it right now. We'll see what happens.”
From a Notre Dame football standpoint, the immediate focus is on the 2023 recruiting cycle, with its primary signing window in mid-December.
The reality is that head coach Marcus Freeman and his staff have the Irish sitting atop the Rivals team recruiting rankings with waves of four- and five-star talent coming in for campus visits the next four weeks before the official-visit window closes.
The fear is that it won’t be sustainable, that Notre Dame’s blueprint of legal internal programs and resources dedicated to NIL and outside collectives aligned with the mission of the school and the NCAA’s apparently toothless advisement will neutralize the best Irish recruiting staff in decades.
In other words, outright pay for play vs. the way NIL was intended — basically what Alabama head coach Nick Saban and Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher were spatting over recently before at least pretending to make up.
For those who push the notion at Swarbrick that ND isn’t doing enough of exploring the gray area of pay for play — and remember Indiana has zero NIL legislation either protecting that or prohibiting it — he is willing to push back hard.
“There’s just no evidence to support that it’s something we should do or something that puts us at a competitive disadvantage,” he said. “As long as we continue to attract the sorts of student-athletes we’re able to attract right now, I’m not sure what would cause somebody to say ‘Oh my gosh, you should be doing what this other school is doing.’
“And I’m a firm believer that this market is going to correct itself, because I think there are going to be a lot of tragic results out of this. And that’s the last place we want to be.”
Swarbrick also bristles when critics say Notre Dame has no NIL plan that the school has made public, keeping in mind NIL by its very nature is not “one size fits all.”
“Our plan is what it always is,” Swarbrick said, “and it came to be before anybody could spell NIL. It’s to maximize the experience and resulting value for our student-athletes. It’s really important to keep in mind I think that (University President) Father (John) Jenkins was the first university president in the country to advocate for name, image and likeness, in his New York Times (2015) interview.
“I think we could make a pretty good case that we built a case study for name, image and likeness with (former women’s basketball All-American) Arike Ogunbowale. When she appeared on Dancing with the Stars and The Ellen DeGeneres Show, all that speaks to the fact that we don’t view this as some big shift in the landscape that requires us to do something else. We're going to continue to assist our student-athletes every way we can.
“And at the end of the day, we wind up with compelling stories that you can point to that frankly are much more powerful than saying, ‘Hey so-and-so just got this deal.’ Do you want to be Alan Page or do you want to be the person who just got that deal?”
“That’s a big part of it. It’s being consistent.”
And that’s also consistency in retaining players, not just winning the initial recruiting battles. In a story by Doug Lesmires of Cleveland.com, Ohio State coach Ryan Day put an approximate price tag of $13 million per year in NIL money — legally — on what it would take to keep the Buckeyes’ roster intact and not have top players leveraging their worth through the transfer portal.
At the beginning of next month, the infusion of NIL into college sports hits its first anniversary, and so marks the one-year commemoration of outgoing NCAA president Mark Emmert applying inertia as his chief strategy.
“I think ultimately solutions will come at a conference level,” Swarbrick said. “But it’s going to take some time. We will get there in part because it’s a fairly irrational market. And I think it’s going to produce some unhappy consequences, both for the students and for the programs.
“I think there will be a willingness — if not an eagerness — to have some reasonable limitation on how these (NIL collectives) are formed. But it’s hard to regulate.
“It just is, because at some level what you’re asking somebody — some enforcer — to do is to look at these transactions and decide which ones are what they say they are and which ones aren’t. It’s just hard to do.”
Maybe even more difficult will be navigating some potentially seismic changes in college athletics beyond NIL and how those changes are structured in the coming years, as existing contracts expire. In a recent piece with Pat Forde of Sports Illustrated, Swarbrick painted a picture of college sports that, at worst, sounded bleak and, at best, blatantly unfamiliar by the middle of the next decade.
“Part of my response to that is: Is there value in avoiding that consequence?” Swarbrick told Inside ND Sports. “I don’t think it’s a bleaker picture of college athletics. I think it’s one that reflects a little bit more of the reality, but we’ll see.
“It’s going to require other things to happen before you can get there. That's why I projected such a long timetable on it. This thing has evolved, evolved and evolved. It’s not going to stop evolving.
“I think the most recent rounds of conference realignment are not particularly good for the sport. And that’s one of the reasons why there will continue to be pressure for other ways to organize and work together.
“I just think you’ll have people continue to look at those possibilities and think about how to organize them. I’d like to be one of them. I’d hate to leave without trying.”
---------------------------------------------------------------
• Talk with Notre Dame fans on The Insider Lounge.
• Subscribe to the Inside ND Sports podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Podbean or Pocket Casts.
• Follow us on Twitter: @insideNDsports, @EHansenND, @TJamesND and @ByKyleKelly.
• Like us on Facebook: Inside ND Sports
• Follow us on Instagram: @insideNDsports
• Subscribe to the Inside ND Sports channel on YouTube.
