Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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state relationships, where there are two state institutions that need to play each other. And so I think we need to let that happen. "More to the point, I don't know who would adopt such a rule, there is no mechanism to do it right now. Matters of scheduling are all conference based, so a conference can adopt this rule but there's no national way to adopt that legislation that I can figure out." BGI: The NCAA Board of Governors voted last week to give Notre Dame and member schools of the "Big Five" conferences "autonomy," essentially meaning these 65 universities will now be able to set their own guidelines in terms of player stipends, health insur- ance benefits, recruiting rules and many other issues. Where do you stand on this initiative? JS: "I'm supportive. I think it was the right thing to do and it was done very well. None of us knows the conse- quence of it, and we will learn that in the months and the years ahead. I do think it will allow us to be more nimble, to ad- dress issues of special concern. "But the notion that there is some widespread commonality among those 65 institutions just isn't true, and that's a healthy thing. That's a good thing. "We will debate and share our per- spectives and come to resolutions. We're going to have to figure out what makes sense and what doesn't." BGI: At your introductory press confer- ence in 2008, you talked about "seismic" changes and shifts that were coming in college athletics, emphasizing that we would hardly recognize the landscape in a few years. We see now what you were referring to. But how close to what you believed was going to happen actu- ally happened? JS: "At the risk of appearing immod- est, very close. It was prefaced on two observations I had made at that point. "One was I believed the Big Ten Net- work was a game-changer and would be very successful and would help to usher in conference realignment be- cause once that model worked, and oth- ers wanted to follow it, and the Big Ten wanted to grow it, it all became about cable footprints. I thought that would happen. "The other was, and I had a view shared by many, that collegiate sports broadcast rights were way undervalued and that there was going to be a market correction coming that was going to be very significant. I actually thought back then that it would be ultimately more significant than it turned out to be, but obviously there was a lot of change. "I thought there would be even more. That is what I was referring to, obliquely, and it largely came to pass." BGI: And through all the change and realignment, how much anxiousness was there regarding whether you had Notre Dame positioned correctly through the storm? JS: "Oh constant. I woke up every night worrying about that. You never knew. You didn't have perfect informa- tion. So you spent a lot of your time gathering information, trying to under- stand what other people were thinking. But then you would be surprised the next day by somebody else's announce- ment. "And so you were in sort of this con- stant state of anxiety of 'what don't I know' and you lived in sort of constant