The story of the day at Notre Dame, obviously, was the hiring of
Brian Kelly as football coach. (Just making sure everyone had heard the news.) But athletic director
Jack Swarbrick took some general questions as well. Here are some of his comments:
• On the subject of the referees who work Notre Dame games, it didn’t sound as if changes were in the works.
“Administratively, you have to affiliate with some conference officiating group,” Swarbrick said. “You can’t be a la carte. You can’t go to the Big 12 one week and say, ‘Hey, can we have a crew?’ or the Big East the next week, because they can’t staff and schedule.
“You have to know a year in advance, so you have to make a conference decision. So that’s the first decision you’re making. You wind up with circumstances where it ought to work, but the problem is it’s never your conference officials. It’s the reality of it. We can’t form a Notre Dame crew that we take around, or no one will play us. It just is what it is. It’s not an obstacle to being successful.
The officiating situation was not a point of discussion when Notre Dame recently renewed its contract with Purdue, Swarbrick said.
“We have this anomaly with the Michigan contract, but with every other contract you do, the visiting team, they designate the officials,” Swarbrick said. “That the basic structure. Sometimes, you’ll deal with a team that won’t feel particularly strongly about that and they’ll give you an opportunity to have your guys do a home game. But generally speaking, the industry standard is the visiting team designates the officials.”
• Former coach
Charlie Weis said Residence Life was the “biggest negative issue” on the Notre Dame campus, but Swarbrick said “No,” decisively, when asked if Res Life was a problem.
“I’m not commenting on Charlie’s perspective,” Swarbrick said. “He has his own perspective, but that was never a focus of any of this.”
• Swarbrick didn’t completely rule out junior-college transfers being accepted at Notre Dame, but he didn’t sound terribly receptive to the idea, either.
“I don’t know,” Swarbrick said. “It’s never a question that’s come up. I haven’t had to deal with it. It’s certainly not our model.”