Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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OPPOSITION TO EIGHT-TEAM PLAYOFF Because the Irish finished No. 8 in the CFP poll at the end of the 2015 regular season, they could have gotten in with the eight-team College Football Playoff. However, Swarbrick sees no ground- swell of support in the collegiate ranks to expand to eight — and he would oppose it even if there was. "There is zero momentum in that regard, and I am not in favor of it," Swarbrick said. "The four works, and in many ways it has exceeded our expectations. I think it has preserved interest in the other bowls, which we were worried about. It's made for a compelling, compact playoff. "And when you talk about this, as we do, the committee talks to the schools that have been through the process. The prospect of playing a third game in the playoff window — we've yet to find a coach who thought that was a good idea after they played two. It's just tough." The four-team College Football Play- off is ideal to Swarbrick for two main reasons. One, it doesn't dilute the importance and every-week-is-a-playoff excite- ment of the regular season. No sport, college or pro, has a more compelling regular season than Football Bowl Sub- division football, and the leaders want to keep it that way. Second, the bowl tradition is main- tained and remains significant to many teams throughout college football. One of the foremost mandates through Swarbrick's first eight years on the job has been to preserve Notre Dame's football independence as long as possible. "We have accepted from day one that there will be years where our inde- pendence will work against us in get- ting into the College Football Playoff," he said. "I don't know what year that will occur, but we're very comfortable with that trade-off, that the benefits of independence are worth the inevitabil- ity that there will be a year where our independence hurts us." There is also this harsh reality: Notre Dame has lost a minimum of three games in 21 of its last 22 football seasons (2012 the exception). Thus, it would be nice to first become a good enough program to where 11-1 be- comes a potential "problem." DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY Because of Notre Dame's indepen- dent status in football, Swarbrick is committed toward building a sched- ule that matches and perhaps even eclipses any among Power Five con- ference teams to serve as a form of a "tiebreaker" for the CFP selection com- mittee. The 2018-19 schedules have added Michigan. Those slates look daunting — especially with Michigan, Louis- ville, Georgia, Georgia Tech and Stan- ford all on the road in 2019, plus USC at home. Swarbrick doesn't want the selection committee to doubt Notre Dame's intent to schedule as well as anyone. It can't be a suicidal schedule, either, which is why there will be one team from a lesser conference also sched- uled, i.e., UMass in 2015, Army in 2016,