Gamblin', freestyle division

 I am reasonably up on my lore, so there are some things I know about the University of Notre Dame, aka the World Capital of Lore.

For instance, I'm fairly certain there's no line in the Notre Dame fight song that goes "Shake down the over-under from the sky." And I'm 100 percent sure it's "Raise a volley cheer on high," not "Raise a parlay cheer on high."

This does not mean they're immune to doing a little illicit wagerin' in the kingdom Knute 'n' Leahy 'n' them, unfortunately.

You might have missed it because N.D. tried to keep it quiet, but the other day it got out that the Irish men's swimming program was running its own private sportsbook, kinda like the one that slicked Robert Shaw in "The Sting" only real. According to a knowledgeable source, team members transformed themselves from butterflyers to bookies, taking bets from teammates on their times in swim meets.

Roughly 60 percent of the 25-man team laid down wagers, according to the same source. 

As usually happens, Notre Dame eventually got wind of this little DraftSwims (FinDuel?) deal. The university responded by suspending the entire men's swimming program for a year. 

And this is where the Blob says what it always says, and what it said when similar gambling rings got busted at Iowa and Iowa State: What do we expect?

Look, the NCAA may not pal around with various online sportsbooks the way MLB, the NFL and the NBA do, but those same sportsbooks are all over the groves of academe. Google "ncaa official sportsbooks", and out tumbles a tsunami of online sites with betting odds on NCAA basketball and football, all of them crowing about how popular it is to bet on the scholars. And ESPN, which has an expansive presence in college football (including a partnership with the SEC Network) even has its own sportsbook, ESPN Bet, where you can lay your money down on the very games ESPN telecasts on Saturday afternoons.

The relationship between college sports and gambling, in other words, is damn near incestuous. It's an entire ecosystem, and it pervades everything -- and by "everything" I mean dorm rooms and locker rooms and, as with the N.D. swimmers, entire programs.

They cruise Google, too, after all. Like everyone else in America, they see the ads for the various sportsbooks during NFL games on Sunday afternoons and Monday evenings and Thursday evenings. Like you or me or Carl the Action Junkie down the street, they're just as enticed by how simple it seems, how exciting, how much doggone fun.

And so allow the Blob to be the bearer of bad news, in light of all that.

What happened at Notre Dame this week? What's happened at Iowa and Iowa State and who knows where else?

Strap in. 'Cause it won't be the last time.