Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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programs (after Pitt and Syracuse have left). Navy will join the Big East in 2015. What affects Notre Dame the most would be in the university's best interest. "It's very exciting with the resources through all of this is the strength of Big East basketball moving forward. Will it remain strong enough to keep Notre Dame from looking for a part-time affiliation else- where? "We were pleased with [the league's] ability to respond to the losses as they had done before," Swarbrick said. "I think they've managed the Pitt and Syracuse exits effectively. The next big thing on the horizon is the commissioner search and finding the next leader for the conference, because he or she will have a lot to do. "It's always hard to answer the ques- tion. I don't want to dodge it. You get new information every day. Right now we feel good about where it has gotten itself and what it's doing. But you get another piece of information every day." Will Notre Dame look elsewhere for part- they have," he said. "They're still the same great over-the-air network they were, but now our partner is also the largest pro- vider of broadband in the country. They're now producers of the best original content. They have cable networks that we can de- ploy over. "They have the 24-hour sports network. The asset base that they've developed — their online strategies — make for a much more interesting conversation and excites us about thinking about things we can do in the future that we're not doing now." Explaining that Texas' Longhorn Net- IN-HOUSE ENTERTAINMENT time affiliation if the Big East can't patch all the cracks? "You never know until you try," Swarbrick added. "It's hard to speculate on it. If we get to that point and we're having those conversations, we're going to find out. I'm prepared to make the case. We'll see if we ever get there. It's hard to predict." year contract extension with NBC for exclusive broadcasting rights for Fight- ing Irish football that would run through the 2015 season. Swarbrick has plenty of time to decide whether another extension In 2009, Notre Dame agreed to a five- TV GUIDE work, a joint effort with ESPN, could never be the model for Notre Dame because of logistics, Swarbrick emphasized the impor- tance of further developing UND.com as a source for Irish sports programming, and pairing it with whatever future television deal is reached is paramount. "I came into the job with that as a prior- ity," he said. "We've only just begun. You'll see more and more. I'm really excited with what we've achieved. We're only 10 per- cent of the way to where we want to be. "That is what defines modern media. Everyone's a producer; everyone has You- Tube. So we have to be a producer of con- tent. We're getting better at it. Coaches are warming to it. Student-athletes are gen- erating their own content for us, and it's working well." ✦ AUGUST 2012 61