Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick isn’t one to hold back when it comes to issues surrounding the Fighting Irish or topics of national interest. In a recent interview with Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde on the topic of the future of Division I athletics the gloves came off, so to speak, for Swarbrick.
Are we truly headed toward an unprecedented break up and possible end of college athletics as we know it? Or, was this a kick in the pants from Swarbrick to start getting leadership across the country to have difficult conversations and formulate a plan for the future that saves the basic structure of the current landscape?
Swarbrick mentions a spectrum where some schools will “license the school name and run an independent business that’s engaged in sports” while other schools will be “integrated into the university in terms of decision making and requirements.” As you guessed, Swarbrick and Notre Dame continue to insist they will only belong to the latter spectrum.
News: Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick tells @SInow NCAA DI breakup is “inevitable.” And targets mid-2030s as the timetable. Says there are “many” schools eager to change conferences now. Wide-ranging interview on the future of college sports: https://t.co/6W9N68hgkY
— Pat Forde (@ByPatForde) April 23, 2022
Swarbrick added: “Absent a national standard, which I don’t see coming, I think it’s [the break into spectrums] inevitable. Mid-2030’s would be the logical time.”
Given that timeline it’s important to point out that the current SEC media rights will end in June 2034 while Notre Dame’s deal with the ACC runs through June 2036. That will be a potentially explosive couple of years.
Swarbrick said: “I’d like to take a real shot at trying to facilitate something people will at least consider nationally. See if we can make any progress. I’d hate to leave without trying.”
It’s clear he’s not happy with the current NIL rules, either. “This morphed so quickly into talent acquisition fees that it’s just stunning…We went from what people thought was an overly restrictive market to the most unrestricted labor market in the history of sports.”
He doesn’t see the NCAA fixing things: “No. I hate to be so pessimistic, but it’s been a lot of years of not seeing them have any [answers].”
Swarbrick mentioned Congress stepping up to the plate as a way to provide a framework for everyone and protect Title IX in addition to non-revenue sports: “The Olympic system then was every bit as broken as collegiate sports is now. Use that bill [the 1978 Amateur Sports Act] as the vehicle. Just amend it to address some of the key issues here, and by doing so protect the Olympic sports.”
I think a lot of college fans and college football fans are resigned to this fate where these sports look radically different in the not-too-distant future. But, even if things unfold as Swarbrick is anticipating there are questions needing to be asked.
Will conferences boot out long-time members who are not generating enough revenue and are we talking about completely separate divisions of sports in football only, or in Olympic sports too?
For me, this is a massive piece to the puzzle for the future. Forde’s article mentions kicking out the poorer schools and I think this will be an incredibly difficult maneuver to make for college administrators. It’s one thing to add members, taking away membership is way more problematic.
When this story broke last week our Slack chat discussed the formation of a junior NFL league and how Notre Dame would move on without being in that league. However, it’s important to note this league is not mentioned in the article or by Swarbrick and is largely a fiction of fans right now.
It’s entirely possible we see a Super Conference that still competes in the same division with the other leagues. But, let’s say it’s an entirely separate and new division, there’s a NFL Jr. league for football, and it includes the following programs:
Clemson
Miami
Florida State
Oklahoma
Texas
Ohio State
Oregon
USC
Georgia
Florida
Alabama
Texas A&M
Auburn
LSU
I seriously doubt the leaders at these schools can agree on all things, or can convince their non-athletic department co-workers, or have the skills necessary to navigate the back room dealing to create this league, even over the next 10-12 years. That seems like a long time, but I really don’t think it is when you’re talking about Ohio State voluntarily leaving the Big Ten behind. These schools can’t get out their own way to agree on a 12-team playoff, how are they going to work together to create a super league out of thin air?
The football versus every other sport aspect is something else I’ve had a hard time wrapping my head around. In that vein, the other top 20 programs (and many more!) outside of the 14 listed above certainly won’t be going quietly into the night when it comes to football. We’ve witnessed nothing but massive greed and opportunism with nearly every athletic department in FBS for decades. Is there a world where Alabama jumps to a new league and Tennessee says, “Way to go you guys, we’ll just become second-class citizens over here!”
That’s a school currently providing a multi-million dollar NIL package to the 6th best Composite quarterback in the 2023 recruiting class. They will come up with ways to stay in the top league for football.
I think we’ll find out schools like Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, Penn State, Baylor, Louisville, North Carolina, Virginia, Stanford, Utah, UCLA, and even Notre Dame are going to make it difficult for this spectrum of two sides to become a reality, and a Super League for football even more difficult.
NCAA Transformation leaders revealed radical changes to college sports this week, sources tell @SINow.
The (unofficial) concepts eliminate scholarship caps in equivalency sports & abolish limits on number of coaches, sending such decisions to conferenceshttps://t.co/k07Z94oF2k
— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) April 27, 2022
There are rumors that Swarbrick will be retiring from his job at Notre Dame within the next 2-3 years and I viewed his comments as a warning to get the rest of the country in line more than a pure prediction. It wouldn’t surprise me if he ends up forming a new leadership committee from former school presidents and athletic directors to bring some national unity where it’s lacking today from current university administrators who, Swarbrick admits, don’t have the time to tackle everything.
Clearly, change is coming. And some pretty major changes, too. Just last week Sports Illustrated outlined some of the recommendations from the Transformation Committee that will later be discussed at league meetings and ultimately voted upon by the NCAA Division I Council and Board of Governors, including:
1) Deregulation on spending money on athletes, including an expansion on academic-related benefits.
2) Sending policy-making decisions to leagues and away from the NCAA.
3) Eliminating the cap on partial scholarship sports.
4) Lifting the rules on the number of coaches allowed in each sport.
5) Limiting the ability to transfer except for 5 weeks after the fall semester and 5 weeks after the spring semester.
6) Simplifying the recruiting calendar into 2 windows: A recruiting window and a dead period.
Some of these are unlikely to pass (bullets 3 & 4 almost certainly will not meet approval any time soon) but it does provide a sense of what is coming soon, especially with the impending retirement of NCAA President Mark Emmert over the next 14 months, or sooner if his replacement is found. The pressure is mounting from schools and the NCAA Board of Governors (comprised mostly of university presidents and chancellors) would be wise to elect someone ready to embrace change while providing the necessary leadership to bring these schools together on a new framework.
I know it doesn’t seem logical where at the player/recruiting level the world of college athletics could get this turned upside down so quickly and yet I’m still betting the fears of a separate NFL minor league are overblown. As Swarbrick noted, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey isn’t Machiavellian enough to use Oklahoma and Texas as leverage to expand the playoffs. There are too many potholes for someone like Sankey to orchestrate a monumental split of divisions while steering around TV contracts, league payouts, 3 centuries of tradition, and inter-political forces at all of these schools.
It’s those politics that will pull things back. The pull of academic-minded schools plus the large collection of tier 2 powers among the Division I schools–to say nothing about these large and passionate fanbases–are going to be able to throw their weight around in the decision-making process a lot more strongly than people assume.
Looking through the lens of football-only, I’d say the odds are something like this:
75% FBS remains largely unchanged with a mixture of NCAA deregulation
20% There’s a split but it’s Power 5 vs. Group of 5
5% A small collection of schools break off from FBS to form a super league
No interest in a super league but I think he’s right that it’s inevitable, especially de facto if not de jure
I pretty much agree with Swarbrick’s prediction, although I think it will happen faster than he does. By the end of the decade, there will be about 24 fully professionalized college football teams, located mostly in the south. Those teams (just the football teams, not other sports) will operate outside of the NCAA altogether. Players will be employees with contracts, agents, and perhaps a union. The College Football League will be broadcast exclusively by ESPN and will end in a 12-team playoff, with the College Super Bowl occurring in mid to late January.
Whether ND will end up as part of the CFL remains an open question. I think it will depend heavily on who ND’s president and AD are when the time to decide comes.
By fully professionalized you mean that they wouldn’t be students of the college right? Then in what way would they still be connected to those schools?
They could be if they wanted to but would not have to be enrolled, no. I’m picturing a corporation called Alabama Crimson Tide Football, Inc., that leases Bryant-Denny Stadium and Alabama’s brand licensing from the university.
From the fan’s perspective, everything would look generally the same. You still go watch the Alabama Crimson Tide play in their usual stadium, with their usual uniforms, against most of their usual opponents. The only difference is that the players are paid employees, not (necessarily) students.
would there be an age limit or eligibility limits?
I think yes and no and I think that would come organically.
Difficulties with unions would be cutting players, so the teams would need to agree with the union to NFL free agent type rules for cutting players.
Also, any play in the contract would mean you cannot transfer to the scholarship league, but the reverse would not be true. Essentially you can move up but not down. That adds some risk to the player like those who declare early for the draft but don’t get picked.
Are you saying players who go to the NFL would no longer be eligible to play in this super-league?
Otherwise I could see a bunch of players continue to play in this league for a long time. There are a ton of really good college players that make basically bad pros. After a few years in the NFL and realizing they didn’t make it could come back to play in this league.
And some might realize it’d be better not to try for the NFL if they are the “stars” of this super-league. I would think the money would be pretty decent (like 1st round pick rookie contract decent maybe for the top players).
I actually didn’t think about that scenario. I meant that if you were in the JR league you could not go back down to the scholarship league much like declaring for the draft ends your CFB eligibility.
I guess you could go Jr to NFL and back (or CFB to NFL to JR). I think the pay disparity between the JR league and the NFL would be similar to Triple-A ball and MLB or CFL and NFL.
Maybe someone could bounce around all three for a number of years. I think there would be inevitable pressure to replace a 28 y/o tweener (tween the JR and NFL) with a 19-y/o to save costs. Again – self correcting.
But who knows. Crash Davis worked for years in Triple-A.
Finally something to fill that dead weekend before the Super Bowl.
It’s going to take 4 years for Texas to move to the SEC. I can’t see a new league forming, taking teams from across different conferences, forming all new league office infrastructure, signing new media rights, and blowing up national scheduling all happening in like 6 or 7 years.
Adding professionalism to the mix with unions on top of that, it seems impossible in such a short time line.
Solving some of the current issues while the SEC and Big Ten continue to increase their revenue seems so much more likely, IMO.
Sure, that could be. And the big GOR deals that run until the mid-2030s (the ACC is one) could slow that down too.
But “NIL” is already well into pay-for-play/pay-for-recruits territory, and that took less than a year. Things are moving very, very quickly.
I look at it more like NIL took the better part of 12 years to become a reality from the beginning of O’Bannon vs. NCAA.
NIL ‘abuse’ could be curtailed pretty quickly, but even if it’s not there’s still a long set of factors that needs to be laid out and explained for a college pro super league to come, and so quickly at that!
I’m really surprised that the teams would want to be a part of a super league. Approximately half of the teams would have losing records each year…that’s quite a change to the current landscape where the good teams typically win most of their games
Well you could have said Oklahoma leaving a conference they’d be favored to win every year to wade into an SEC west death match was crazy, but the administration cared more about the potential money than winning games.
And a complete mess of a Texas program going with them.
The NFL has loser teams too; every pro league does.
I’d be interested to see how the money would work out. I’m not at all convinced there are many schools pining for a professional league with their name attached to it.
My main theory: Costs would go up, potentially way, way up.
Ohio State vs. Michigan was watched by 15.8 million people last year. The NFL averaged 17.3 million viewers per nationally televised game. A college super league could sign a big TV deal but I’m not sure it’d be so big as to offset all of their extra costs.
The top 10-15 college football schools have operating incomes in the neighborhood of a NFL franchise. I think the current landscape is far too safe of a profit for them to voluntarily create massive payroll for players and god knows who else around their programs once it becomes professionalized.
Another interesting wrinkle…
We know most of these college football programs take their profit and keep it within the football team and/or athletic department. I wonder if a professional league would be a way for the academic-side of the schools to grab some power back by licensing their name and facilities to funnel more money back away from football.
But then again, like I said costs would shoot up exorbitantly in this scenario and I’m not sure there would be much left over for all those darn book people.
Also I’m not clear on how all the rules would affect the quality of the play. If it turns into the minor leagues or a farm league it may not have the same draw. The best non-NFL players aren’t necessarily going to be the 18-20 year old kids. But is a QB who would be the 5th string QB (28 years old) for an NFL team going to draw the same kind of eyeballs as the starter for one of these superleague teams even though he’ll be better for the team than the new 5 star elite talent that could/would be a 1st round pick in a couple of years?
So besides the sky-rocketing costs, would it actually keep even the same level of viewers? I’m a bit skeptical long-term.
I’d have to think any Super League attached to college would have to keep some sort of age limit like 18-24, or similar.
I kind of feel like it would be like a weird, reverse-engineered system similar to major junior hockey where there are age limits, players aren’t officially paid, but they receive money through other means. Football here would probably pay players more directly but long term we’d view the teams as ‘clubs’ from these schools, although not actually going to school (but they still could if they wanted).
I think a Super League would be massively popular, though. I think all of our writers were disagreeing in our Slack chat.
I figured the national average numbers would go down for college football, but the percentage of viewers would swing more toward the Super League. For example, the big Super League games would get 80% of the ratings we see today but non Super League games would get like 30% of the viewers as today. ND games would be under 1 million viewers per game at first and probably 500,000 within 10 years.
I think it would depend on how many teams would join, for example, Michigan, Penn State, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Washington, Va Tech, or UCLA.
If it’s literally all of the most popular/best 25-30 college football programs I think it’ll be a huge success.
A lot of our writers disagreed, but I think it would kill ND football as we know it. I think there’s quite a bit of fooling ourselves or trying to convince ourselves about the community and student involvement driving traditions but when ND is left out, no longer signing the best high school recruits, and we’re living for the best rivalry with Purdue….I don’t want that world at all.
I also think a Super League of about 25 teams would be very successful, at least for a while.
I go back and forth on your last paragraph. Personally, I am very tired of the Alabama Show featuring Clemhio State, and I hate the playoffs. There is some appeal to the prospect of ND playing in a more nationally competitive version of college football, even if we’re playing with mostly 3-stars, and even if it means we never see Southern Cal or Ohio State or Bama again.
Purdue can pound sand, though.
That’s wild to me. Would you push that button today and effectively make Notre Dame D-2 in the football world?
No.
But if, in the future, the choice is between playing in a fully professionalized, mostly southern Super League, or playing in a smaller version of D-I that still gives out 85 scholarships but does not attract the best talent out of high school (5-stars and most 4-stars), I’d probably choose the latter.
D-2 really has nothing to do with any of this.
I think the point is that the smaller version of D-1 would essentially be like D-2 now. It’s going to be the significant step behind the super-league.
Oh. Well, I don’t agree that the smaller version of D-1 would be like D-2. D-2 gives out a total of 36 scholarships, but often splits them among players so that they’re partial scholarships. D-2 is Grand Valley State, not a Purdue team (to use Eric’s example) that has decided not to play professional football.
It just seems like a very extreme interpretation of something that I don’t think I even suggested, which is frustrating. I’m trying to figure out why that keeps happening.
In this scenario, Notre Dame would probably pluck some transfers from GVSU, to be honest 🙂
GVSU signs almost entirely players who have no star rating at all, so I think that’s a bit dramatic.
Of course it is, I’m just being funny ACS.
Correct, call it whatever you like it would be perceived as a D-2-type league.
Okay, a fully professional league is one thing. I was just referring to Alabama being too good and the playoffs sucking seemingly providing appeal to never playing college football at the highest level ever again.
It’s a weird capitulation?
Also, I am trying to be clearer with my posts so as to avoid misunderstandings, and maybe this can help — what made you interpret that comment as, “ACS would make ND a D-2 school today?”
Couldn’t been seen as more like hockey, with a D1 league while the upper league is more like the AHL ? By this I mean a league that still requires some academics and a league that doesn’t pretend to.
That’s basically what I expect, yeah.
How that is perceived by the public is a different thing. I think though that ND fans would continue to pull for D1 ND and not give a shite about AHL tOSU.
The Wednesday night game thread would be LIT.
I would absolutely rather ND drop down a level than jump into NFL-lite with the upper half of the SEC.
Capitulation!
Actually, let’s drop down to D-III for one year so we can finally get off the schneid against Chicago.
D-III has a 16-team playoff, though.
I’m a little dubious about the success of the supposedly inevitable SuperLeague. How many teams are actually going to join a league that relies on major, annual, coordinated booster investment where the boosters only get to go 8-4 each year and can still go decades without winning a SuperLeague championship?
Even if you start with the Super SEC you still have to kick out at least Vanderbilt, probably Missouri and Kentucky, and then are you really getting both Mississippi teams, Arkansas, and SCar? Suddenly you’re down to 9ish South Eastern teams that putting up that money, counting Texas and Oklahoma. How are you filling out the rest of a 24-32 team league?
What you’re really asking boosters to do is foot the bill for running a professional sports franchise with none of the benefits of ownership where their money gets laundered through stuck-up academic boards of directors who are trying to pocket as much of the cash themselves as possible. Is T. Boone Pickens signing OKST up for that? How about Phil Knight and Oregon? I think I can safely guarantee that Tom Mendoza isn’t cutting those kind of checks for Notre Dame.
Regarding the B1G, there’s an under appreciation for what that conference exists for: the next B1G sports media contract will eclipse $1 billion per year, the most recent Big 10 Academic Alliance annual report from 2018 reported over $10.5 billion in distributed grant revenue. As much as sports move news stories it provides a pittance of the money flowing through B1G institutions, less than 10% of just grant revenue. The Big 10 will move very slowly, to the point of being imperceptible to the human eye, on any decision that even tertiarily impacts the Big 10 Academic Alliance.
It seems more likely to me that the 121 schools that aren’t [Alabama, Texas, Texas A&M, Auburn, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, LSU, Oklahoma, Ole Miss] reform an athletic association of some kind that sets a set of rules that the schools can agree to regarding recruiting and student-athlete compensation that can continue to play college football, just without the ten or so schools who have been [openly] cheating for decades and now are maybe just bending the rules. It can “just mean more” to those ten schools as long as a reformed athletic association allows the remaining 92% of universities to continue to harvest their alumni equity through sports, provide opportunities to kids who wouldn’t otherwise get them, and those fans and alumni still want to support their schools’ athletics.
My boy T. Boone died in 2019, but otherwise excellent thoughts!
Yea these are some great reasons to be skeptical.
These are all good reasons why a semi-pro/minor league setup is not inevitable. Let’s be honest, college football has always been a development league for the NFL (at least among the highest level players). And the NFL is happy with the current arrangement, because they don’t pay for any of it.
Although everybody loves the money, don’t overestimate the egos of the academic sides of the universities. Many already bristle at the relative importance of athletics at their institutions, regardless of the income it provides. ND is a prime example of this. I think they might put their feet down when it came to something like a professional league.
I think rather than some drastic restructuring, we’ll probably continue to see more of what we’re currently seeing. The wild west of NIL/pay for play will probably continue as it is for another couple of years, with some intermittent efforts by conferences or the NCAA to place some regulatory framework over it. This will result in a major change in the way that recruiting works, so even without structural changes, we will probably end up with some major have/have not discrepancies – moreso than we already have.
This leads me to hope that Marcus Freeman is a lights out gameday coach, or can become one quickly. Because all the hustle in the world is not going to make a difference if recruiting is primarily about “who’s going to pay me more?” I think it already is that way for some kids, and that will probably become more normalized over coming years, until it becomes the primary language of transaction.
Related – Miami was once a crown jewel of the CFB world and one of the factors that has kept them down is that the university itself does not want to be DA U and all the negative press that comes with it. I do think a lot of schools would do likewise
Swarbrick was definitely launching a call to action. I for one am extremely skeptical that after everything Notre Dame has done to position itself among the “Super League” schools that it would suddenly back off and play on the “Came Here to Play School” tier. They’ve done a ton especially in the past decade that implies the contrary (Crossroads, paying Kelly big bucks, pushing their chip stack in on Freeman, seemingly playing the NIL game at least a bit, etc).
I think the difference that’s going to become evident in the near future is “playing the NIL game at least a bit” vs “in it to win it”. ND does not seem to have the will to having consortiums of backers throwing down millions of bucks to recruit kids. We’ll see whether that pans out as the primary way that top recruits are brought in, but I expect/fear that it will. On this note, I do not expect us to land Moore.
ah i see you found my copy of The Agenda
I have the same worry about Moore, but I do think Notre Dame has lots of fans, especially moneyed ones, who weren’t around the program enough to drop the bag but will happily write big checks from a distance. So basically the finance bros and lawyers across this country can be mobilized now while before we lacked the local car dealership base to do things the classic way under the table. Maybe this is nonsense but it feels possible given how geographically spread the fanbase is and it certainly is not hurting for money
Honestly I think the type of money we’re looking at (if all the rumored amounts are true) go beyond finance bros and lawyers. I’m talking Texas oil money, like Eric’s boy T Boone
Eh I really think those types are out there for us. Maybe not quite T Boone level but there are only two or three of those around anyway. Notre Dame and it’s fanbase cannot cry poor
Timely:
https://twitter.com/RossDellenger/status/1521595940804579329?s=20&t=Fu-8HeYO-91IZjKdfq19hg
Key points: