Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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UNDER THE DOME The idea behind the shift is that the NCAA's effort to keep the finan- cial haves and have-nots on an equal playing field was a farce. The rules as they currently stand prevent major programs like Notre Dame from using their deep pockets to provide benefits for their athletes that smaller schools can't afford. The big schools found other ways to use their money to woo student-athletes — massive stadiums, state-of-the-art training facilities and multi-mil- lion dollar coaching bud- gets, for example. The divide between the two classes of col- lege football schools was impossible to regu- late. The rules, instead, ended up hamstringing bigger schools from pay- ing to take better care of the student-athletes that were generating all of their revenue. The have-nots are free to adopt any new rules that the autono- mous conferences write, but many won't be able to afford to do so. The gap between those two groups will likely grow, but it was better than the alternative threatened by several conference com- missioners — splitting entirely from the NCAA. "If we do not achieve a positive outcome un- der the existing big tent of Division I, we will need to consider the es- tablishment of a venue with similar conferences and institutions where we can enact the desired changes in the best in- terests of our student- athletes," SEC commis- sioner Mike Slive said in July. The "Big Five" at the top may still become a de facto league of their own in the future. In the wake of their newly granted autonomy, sev- eral schools expressed interest in those confer- ences playing only teams from other top five con- ferences in football. Irish head coach Brian Kelly said he'd be in favor of other colleges eliminating cupcakes from their schedules. "We would be ex- tremely excited if every- body would go down the same road and play the kind of schedule we do," Kelly said. "We think that would be a level playing field." U n f o r t u n a t e l y f o r Notre Dame, that would mean eliminating the two or three games per season they play against teams outside the top five conferences. The b i g g e s t n o n - s t a r t e r among those contests is the annual meeting with Navy. Kelly argued that the Midshipmen deserve to be included in the ac- ceptable upper echelon of opponents. Swarbrick objected to the idea of limiting fu- ture potential opponents on different grounds. He said playing those 64 other schools exclusively NOTRE DAME FOOTBALL TICKETS 25 YEARS IN BUSINESS Call today for Special Discount 1-800-925-2500 www.NotreDameTickets.com