No scales adorn the eyes of outgoing Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick. The train is coming and he sees it clearly, even if it's still a bend away and beyond the sightline of mere mortals.
Swarbrick told Sports Illustrated yesterday that the breakup of Division I athletics is "inevitable," and it's no more than a decade away. Mid-2030s, perhaps. Earlier than that, maybe.
What's going to happen, he thinks, is big-boy college athletics will split along two fault lines: One for schools that still want to at least nominally braid athletics into the university's academic mission, and one for Whatsamatta U. Athletics Inc.
The latter will be tied to the university as a brand name only. The former will be schools like ... well, like Notre Dame.
Or at least the Notre Dame envisioned by Swarbrick and the rest of the administrative structure in South Bend.
And here's where Swarbrick's vision might get a bit cloudy.
God love him and God love N.D., they still see themselves as an entity whose path is somehow different from SEC Inc. and Big Ten Corp., primarily because they're able to maintain at least the appearance of football independence. But that different path becomes more indistinguishable every day.
Truth is, they're an ACC football school in everything but name, as both a conference member in everything else and a school that plays half its football schedule against ACC opponents. They have a lucrative TV deal, same as all the other major football powers. And they have a national brand -- maybe a more lucrative national brand than anyone else's.
They're as corporate and driven by the financial ledger as anyone, in other words. And their football independence is not long for this world.
As inevitable as Swarbrick finds the dissolution of Division I sports, it seems to me that so, too, is Notre Dame eventually getting swallowed in the realignment tsunami. Before all this is done, it seems to me, Division I will be down to two or at most three giant media conglomerates -- the Big Ten, the SEC and (maybe) the Big 12 -- and they'll have vacuumed up every significant athletic program in the country.
Where does that leave Notre Dame? If the ACC gets cannibalized the way the Pac-12 just was, where do the Irish land? How do they avoid joining the Super Ten or SEC Inc. in football if those conferences have expanded to 20 or 25 schools and no one can afford an open date anymore?
Notre Dame still swings a big club in football because it's Notre Dame, and its longstanding deal with NBC affords it a certain bargaining power. But eventually that club will be a twig compared to the ones the Super Ten and SEC Inc. will be lugging around. Eventually, they'll both be too big for even an eminence like N.D. to demand the kind of arrangement it has with the ACC.
The day approacheth, in other words. And that right soon, as the good book says.
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