Notre Dame’s Swarbrick: Latest Conference Realignment a ‘Complete Disaster’

The Irish remain independent in football as the rest of the sport shuffles conferences.

As the college football landscape was turned on its head over the past month or so, one of the sport’s looming powers remained out of the fray: independent Notre Dame, which, save for the pandemic-impacted 2020 season, has never been a part of a conference as a football program.

So, following the latest round of conference realignment that saw the Big Ten pillage the West Coast’s top programs and brought the Pac-12 to the brink of extinction, with some help by the Big 12, Fighting Irish athletic director Jack Swarbrick had some strong words about the state of the sport.

Speaking as a guest on the Dan Patrick Show on Wednesday, Swarbrick chastised college football’s decision-makers—himself included—for allowing conference realignment to reach this apparent point of no return.

"A Complete Disaster."

-Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick sums up what's happened with College Football#GoIrish pic.twitter.com/wEBlqlUk3G

— Dan Patrick Show (@dpshow) August 23, 2023

“[It’s a] complete disaster. I wish I knew,” Swarbrick said when asked by Patrick how the sport reached this point. “Everybody in the industry has to take responsibility here. I’m not excluding myself from that. I think the decision making has lost its way in terms of the focus on the student-athlete and what’s primarily best for them. But we are where we are, we have to try and make it work.”

Swarbrick identified finding a home for Stanford and Cal, two of the four schools left in the Pac-12 beyond this year, and said that Notre Dame is “very much so” lobbying the ACC, the Fighting Irish’s conference for most non-football sports, to add them. When asked by Patrick whether these types of decisions are driven by greed on the part of the sport’s power brokers, Swarbrick acknowledged that they were “based on money.”

“They’re certainly based on money, there’s no question,” Swarbrick said. “Some of that is the demands that have arisen over time to find more revenue to meet this requirement or this requirement, so I’m not terribly comfortable with the description of it as greed. But it is all about money.”