Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/76097
college sport of them all were shoehorned into the span of a year, it was clear that Swarbrick was looking forward to a calmer calendar ahead. Midway through our interview, how- ever, Swarbrick seemed to get a quick charge when the conversation shifted to Notre Dame remaining independent. "It's South Bend," Swarbrick said when asked if doing things the hard way is a point of pride for the university. "Father Sorin didn't go south from the Ohio River, he went north. Yeah, there's a certain ethic and ethos about this place and about earn- ing things and work- ing through hardship that is part of the uni- versity." Swarbrick's cam- has all the key elements, every one of those elements has 30 decisions behind it that still have to be made. There's a lot of work in the next six months that has to get done. "Having said that, I think I can say with OFF IN A CONFERENCE. THAT'S PROB- ABLY STATISTICALLY ACCURATE. IT'S WHAT INDEPENDENCE DOES TO WIN A NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP, THEY'D PROBABLY BE BETTER "YOU'VE SEEN IT WRITTEN THAT IF [THE IRISH] REALLY WANT IT'S THE PLATFORM IT GIVES US. … THAT'S WHY I CLING TO IT WITH FOR THE UNIVERSITY THAT MAKES ME SO PASSIONATE ABOUT IT. IT'S NOT AN ATHLETIC ISSUE; paign for prolonged independence picked up a victory in late June when he was chosen by conference commissioners to present a postseason playoff plan — one designed to leave the door to a title open for deserving programs with or without a conference championship in tow. It was later approved by university presidents and will go into effect in 2014. The decision allowed Fighting Irish fans to exhale. For Swarbrick, rest will have to wait a while longer. "There's a period ahead of us of really intense work on implementation," he said. "Because, while I think it's a great plan and FOR THE UNIVERSITY, IT WOULD BE A MUCH CLOSER CALL." SWARBRICK SUCH VIGOR. IF I DIDN'T THINK IT WAS DELIVERING THOSE RESULTS some confidence that I'm not going to have another period like this. With the NBC dis- cussions, postseason football and all that's been happening with conference realign- ment, this has been a pretty unusual year. I'm so lucky, because when I turn externally to do all that and fo- cus exclusively on that, I know the peo- ple here … the whole senior team, will do an extraordinary job keeping the place run- ning." What Swarbrick wanted to make clear, though, is that other major conferences interested in Notre Dame's membership (football included) are not trying to back the Irish into a corner. "It's much more direct than indirect," he explained. "We work together on a host of things, so having good working relation- ships is important. Because of that, because there's an underlying collegiality that ev- eryone wants to maintain, it's much more of sort of a direct conversation than I think people think it is. I certainly believe in our attractiveness. But people spend less time thinking about us than our fans think they do. They're not obsessing about what we're going to do. AUGUST 2012 59