Q&A with Notre Dame AD: 'No reason we can't compete for national championship'
SOUTH BEND – With college football season and the opening of a renovated Notre Dame Stadium less than two months away, IndyStar's Notre Dame Insider Laken Litman sat down with Fighting Irish athletic director Jack Swarbrick.
Swarbrick discussed his expectations for the upcoming season after going 4-8, how he believes Brian Kelly’s role has changed, future opponent scheduling, conference expansion and much more.
Notre Dame kicks off its season Sept. 2 against Temple.
Question: Will you evaluate this season any differently after going 4-8?
Answer: I use the same factors. I, like everyone else, use wins and losses — but it’s only one factor. We’re looking at a host of things related to the performance of the students on the field and in the classroom and how they represent the university, how the program represents us. We have specific standards within the program that are performance related.
I’m very confident that we’ll be significantly better this year.
Q: When have you faced the most pressure in your life, and how does preparing for this season compare?
A: I thrive on it, so there’s been a fair amount of it. Being charged with the competition of the Pan American Games (as a member of the Indiana Sports Corp. in 1987) when we had limited resources. Meeting the bid to relocate the NCAA (1999) or bring a Super Bowl to Indianapolis (2012), those are big moments of pressure.
The difference here is you have 750 pressure points because you feel a responsibility for the experience for each of the students who are varsity athletes here. I feel pressure about the big things like you’d expect, but I feel much more pressure about the individual result and the successes and failures of the individual young people.
[As far as comparing those events (before he became Notre Dame’s athletic director) to the upcoming season, Swarbrick called it “normal pressure.”]
Sometimes you feel enormous pressure because you’re at the Frozen Four and you want your team to win. Sometimes you feel enormous pressure because you’re coming off a bad year. I mean, it happens on both extremes. It’s just part of the job. The importance of it is different. I don’t feel more pressure about it, but I recognize the importance of it.
Notre Dame needs to be in a position to compete for national championships in football. There’s nobody here who doesn’t embrace that as the expectation.
Q: Texas A&M athletic director Scott Woodward went on the "Paul Finebaum Show" during SEC spring meetings in May and said that coach Kevin Sumlin “knows he has to win and he has to win this year and we have to do better than we’ve done in the past.” Do you feel this way about Brian Kelly?
A: No. We have to win because we’re Notre Dame, not because we were 4-8 last year. The approach we took in the offseason was an approach based on an assumption of stability. We went and attracted some extraordinarily talented people to join this staff. And you don’t get people of that caliber if they don’t think there’s going to be stability.
[After going 4-8, Notre Dame hired seven new coaches, including offensive (Chip Long), defensive (Mike Elko) and special teams (Brian Polian) coordinators.]
Q: Brian talked this spring about changing his approach this season. He noted spending more time with players, giving up play-calling duties, etc. Was this something you all discussed?
A: Brian and I spent a lot of time talking about what the things were that would help make us better. His willingness to examine every aspect of the program was really central to the result that was achieved. But, you know, I think certainly I, and I believe Brian too, have recognized that he’s at his very best when he can oversee the whole program. The challenge is avoiding him getting pulled into certain areas because they’re not working well.
Some people have portrayed it as sort of a conscious choice of, "I’m gonna spend more time with the student-athletes and I did." It’s about managing his time. It’s not that Brian doesn’t love spending time with the student-athletes or thought all of the sudden, "Oh gee, I should spend more time with my student-athletes." It’s that, "I gotta reallocate where my time is going so I can do it. So I can coach the coaches and spend more time with the students and spend more time on the overall strategy." And the hires we made were designed to do that, to give him that opportunity. It’s not a sudden realization he should be doing it. It’s, OK, we gotta create the space for him to do it.
Q: Was Brian being pulled in too many directions last season?
A: There were a number of things going on. By the third game, he had to spend a lot more time on the defense and play a role there. He wound up with his play-calling role increasing as the year went on as opposed to otherwise. There were a number of issues like that. That’s not to say something like that won’t happen that he will have to give more of his time to, but I feel better about the structure supporting him now. And I’ll use the strength and conditioning program (with new coach Matt Balis) as an example. It’s going to free him up a lot. He doesn’t have to manage it so much now as designate the strategy for it, what he wants to achieve, and let those people go do it.
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Q: Speaking of the strength program, were you surprised how much work needed to be done in that area?
A: I never saw it as an endurance issue. In fact, this team fought pretty hard all year notwithstanding the outcome in eight of those games. It was more a tailoring of the player development to the needs of the position and the person. I think we’re better at that now. A lot of that’s the philosophy. What are you trying to achieve? What do you want your offensive linemen to look like? There are different approaches to that; there isn’t one answer. So I think we got greater clarity on that.
But frankly, more significant than the physical consequence of it is the cultural consequence. And the players may have observed that they’re working a lot harder, but what they were doing was competing more. And everybody was being held to the same standard.
Q: What stands out to you in Matt Balis’ workouts?
A: As I’ve seen them work out, there are two things that strike me most. One, everybody is in motion all the time. The deployment of what’s going on is everybody’s active. And the other is there’s a competitive nature to it. I mean you are really competing and they built that in a host of ways. But you don’t want to be the team group to finish last, you don’t want your position to finish last; you are competing.
Q: Switching gears, what would it take for Notre Dame to join the ACC full time in football?
A: You can always weigh some circumstance that would do it, but we don’t think that way and we are very comfortable with and focused on our independence because of the things it does for the university, not for us. If we didn’t have a broadcast partner, that would be one thing. But we have a great relationship with NBC and look forward to that continuing.
I don’t foresee any change in philosophy which would ever cause us to do it.
[On the first day of ACC media days Thursday, conference Commissioner John Swofford was asked this same question. He said Notre Dame joining the ACC as a full member is “not a point of discussion” between the university and the league.
"There wasn’t an expectation that at some point in time Notre Dame would ask for full membership in football,” Swofford said. “That is not a point of discussion at this given point in time. Obviously, if Notre Dame reached the point where they wanted to have that discussion, we would readily sit down and speak with them about that."]
Q: Have you found that not having a 13th game or winning a conference is hurting Notre Dame as it pertains to the College Football Playoff?
A: There will be years where not having a conference championship works against us. We understand that, we factor it into our calculus. But, given the schedules we’re building, I’ll be very comfortable arguing most years that our 12 games compare favorably with everybody else’s 13. When you say a 13-game schedule is superior to our 12-game schedule, you have to compare all the games. We’re building schedules that I think will stand up to that comparison well. They’ll be very tough to navigate. No one will ever accuse us of backing in with the schedules we’ve built for the future.
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Q: Notre Dame announced a two-game series with Arkansas last week in 2020 and 2025. How did that relationship come about? Is there a connection between the schools?
A: Frankly, it’s more random than people would anticipate in a sense. We’re trying to find the highest quality opponent we can who will do a back-to-back (series) where the games are separated by so many years. Some schools just don’t want to do that. They want them in consecutive years and this is separated by five years, so that becomes part of the equation. And do they have the dates open? You start with targets but there’s an element of luck you can’t control.
Q: What kind of opponents do you target?
A: We target SEC or Big 12 opponents because we want conference markers. We’ll always have two Pac 12 markers (in Southern Cal and Stanford), we’ll always have ACC markers; most years we’ll have a Big Ten marker. That’s part of the strategy of saying we’re giving you points of reference to all of our performances against the conferences.
Q: Given the outcome of the 2012 national championship, would you ever try to schedule Alabama?
A: Alabama is one of those opponents we would love to play. I hope we do get that done. It was interesting to see the list of teams we’ve never played (from the SEC, which include Mississippi State, Auburn and Kentucky). I frankly didn’t know it. I have a great relationship with the Auburn athletic director (Jay Jacobs), and I’d love to figure out how to do that. There’s something to be said for ticking off everyone on that list until you can say you’ve done it over the history of this program.
Q: The Division I Football Oversight Committee will examine potential changes to the season, including extending it to a 14-week schedule. How do you feel about this?
A: It’s really important to do that. We need the second bye. I think in terms of academic performance and player safety, what we find in those years where we have two byes is it’s a much better situation for the students. So I’m a big proponent of trying to make that work.
I recognize on a lot of campuses that will involve playing a game before students are on campus. In some cases that happens already. You have an absolute limit on the back end with conference championships. You could go in some cases a week later in regular season, but most of it will happen by going a week earlier.
Q: What are you most looking forward to this season?
A: Opening the renovated stadium (as part of the Campus Crossroads Project) is going to be enjoyable for everyone — fans, players, media. I’m excited about that. It’s been a long process from the first idea to opening it. I think people will be amazed at all the ways it impacts their experience, from the concourses to the restrooms to your seat being wider to having video in the stadium. In some ways we’ve enhanced its historical connection. The concourses feel much more historic now than they did.
[The Campus Crossroads Project is the largest building initiative in school history. The $400 million project includes construction of more than 750,000 square feet of classroom, research, student facility, digital media, performance, meeting, event and hospitality space.
The facilities will be housed in three buildings attached to the west, east and south sides of Notre Dame Stadium. Construction began in 2014.]
Q: Sometimes it seems like other programs are ahead of Notre Dame, whether it's facilities, sports science, recruiting, national championships. Would Notre Dame ever be willing to change anything to regain national prominence?
A: No. I don’t think there are any obstacles to us regaining national prominence other than our own performance. Is it harder here? Yes. But that’s OK. It’s one of the things that makes it more rewarding. But there’s no fundamental excuse or reason why we can’t compete for a national championship. We have to continue to invest in the program, whether that be sports science or facilities, but we have historically done that. We can be successful with our admissions standards and we can find enough talented people who want to be here.
Follow IndyStar Notre Dame Insider Laken Litman on Twitter and Instagram: @lakenlitman.