SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Jack Swarbrick doesn’t know when college football will be back. Notre Dame’s athletics director doesn’t know whether it will be back this year, either. That’s because nobody has those answers in mid-April with the country in lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic and universities forced to evolve into institutions of remote learning.
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Notre Dame has already decided to make at least half of its summer courses virtual, with the other half of summer school to be decided on May 15. At that point, Notre Dame’s football summer recruiting schedule could get the green light. Or it could be scrapped. On Monday, the university announced all summer camps, including Irish Invasion, would be canceled.
Through it all, Swarbrick has had to look over budgets and figure out how they can work during a shutdown of both college and collegiate athletics. Notre Dame isn’t to the point of enacting pay reductions to athletics staff, Swarbrick said, but that could happen down the road.
“We’re certainly not spending any money right now that we don’t absolutely have to. That’s the starting point,” Swarbrick said. “We’re going through the analysis of various budget scenarios. And based off those and the information we get from university and medical experts, we’ll continue to do more.”
Swarbrick said spring athletes who had a year of eligibility restored due to canceled seasons would not automatically return to Notre Dame to use it. He said individual coaches would decide how to manage their own rosters, but that it would be done within scholarship budgets.
For Swarbrick and all of college athletics, whatever happens next won’t be closely tied to football as much as it will be dictated by it. Swarbrick understands this, even if it’s impossible to know when or how college football will return. And in this sporting vacuum, strategically mapping out end games for college football’s return has become its own enterprise. How would the season work without fans? Could a September game be played in December? Would college football really do a “conference games only” schedule? What about a spring season?
“I’m much more focused on the things that will trigger decisions,” Swarbrick said. “Who are the health and safety people that will be the resources? What data are we looking for? What other activities in our communities will we want to see activated? It’s been much more about that than trying to game-plan scenarios.
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“So much of that right now feels, while entertaining for fans, so much of an empty business exercise.”
Still, it’s worth contemplating what college football will look like whenever it restarts. And Swarbrick will have a voice in crafting that as a member of the College Football Playoff Management Committee, which held a call with Vice President Mike Pence last week.
Notre Dame’s athletics director talked through five of those bigger questions with The Athletic.
Who decides whether Notre Dame football can restart?
As much as Swarbrick will indulge hypotheticals about what an altered season might look like, getting to the root of who’s calling the shots on the college football season is what he’s tracking most. It’s not so much that he doesn’t have an answer for who will make this call. He simply believes college football’s leadership is working through what events need to occur before any green light would be given.
“That’s actually the thing I focus the most on,” Swarbrick said. “That’s exactly the right question.
“In the first instance it is the governors. If governors in two or three or four states say, ‘We’re not going to allow mass events,’ or ‘We’re not going to allow our universities to return to school,’ I don’t think it would take much of that to dictate the results. If California didn’t allow for it, would we play college football?”
It’s not that college football needs all 50 states to reopen for a season to be played, but Swarbrick believes it will take something close to unanimity. On Monday, governors in South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia indicated they would begin reopening their states in the coming days and weeks. However, Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb said the state’s stay-at-home order would continue to May 1. And last week, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said it’s unlikely large gatherings will happen in his area during 2020.
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Notre Dame’s season is scheduled to conclude at USC on Nov. 28.
“A state like (California) with so many prominent schools, I’m not sure how you go forward with college football in a traditional way if some states aren’t prepared to do it,” Swarbrick said. “Beyond that, I think the commissioners, most importantly (Power 5) commissioners, will be the ones who are engaged in collecting the health and safety information to make initial decisions and to decide any of these format issues about the season.”
How would a season without (or with fewer) fans work?
Swarbrick is on record as against the idea of playing college football games in closed stadiums, which doesn’t mean he’s in favor of the sport returning only when it can hit capacity crowds. The idea of Notre Dame Stadium holding 77,622 people at any point this year — Billy Joel is scheduled to perform there on June 20 — feels like a reach as sports continue to be postponed and medical experts talk more about a prolonged return to normalcy.
For Swarbrick, any return to football first starts with Notre Dame returning for the fall semester. In short, there cannot be college football without college. And that position guides what Swarbrick considers the bare minimum for playing a college football game.
“If school is back in session, it is extremely hard for me to see how we could say we’re comfortable having students together in our residence halls or comfortable having them eat together in the south dining hall, but we’re not comfortable having you walk across campus to sit together and watch a football game?” Swarbrick said. “Those go hand in hand.”
For Swarbrick, a resumption of college football would have to at least include Notre Dame’s student body and faculty being able to attend the games. But that doesn’t mean he’s against the idea of Notre Dame Stadium being under capacity if it would mean meeting safety criteria.
“As you go through the scenarios, that’s the next one,” Swarbrick said. “Do you say we’re going to (block off) every other row and every other seat? You obviously still have all kinds of social distancing issues in concourses and restrooms that would be challenges to manage.”
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If the season started in October, would September games get played in December?
Head coach Brian Kelly has floated the idea of Notre Dame opening the year in October, basically starting with the game against Wisconsin at Lambeau Field on Oct. 3 and playing the remainder of the slate through December. In theory, that would mean Notre Dame would face Navy, Arkansas, Western Michigan and Wake Forest after Thanksgiving weekend.
The upside of the delayed start is obvious, giving the decision makers around college football an extra month to see how the coronavirus pandemic evolves. It would also allow football teams to return to campus at roughly the same time as regular students. The first day of Notre Dame’s fall semester is scheduled for Aug. 25, four days before the scheduled season opener against Navy in Ireland.
However, the idea of simply tacking the first month of the season onto the back end doesn’t appear doable to Swarbrick. There’s conference championship weekend to account for, which complicates availability. Can minor bowl games get moved or canceled? Would the College Football Playoff get pushed into late January?
“It’s really hard to expand the back end of the calendar unless you were committed to trying to move bowl games and adjust the College Football Playoff. There just isn’t much room,” Swarbrick said. “I think you could probably find, if you were creative, another week on the back end of the calendar. But that would probably be about it. Maybe two. But I don’t see more than that, unless you were going to radically change the postseason environment.”
There’s also the issue of final exams in this ad hoc December schedule. Would Notre Dame (or college football at large) be on board with the regular season stretching through finals?
“I don’t know. I don’t want to speculate on that one,” he said. “Too many conversations have to be had beyond the athletic community about that topic.”
What about a schedule of conference games only?
Swarbrick said this idea has been floated in meetings among administrators already. He questioned the logic of ripping up the 2020 schedule and replacing it exclusively with in-conference games. That would leave some teams with eight games. It would leave some with nine. It would shelve some traditional rivalries.
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It would also leave Notre Dame without a schedule.
“I think as a practical matter, it is much easier to modify the calendar than it is to move games around within the calendar,” Swarbrick said. “If you eliminated the first three weeks of the season to get extra time, you would impact conference schedules very little and could still play as the calendar was laid out to play.
“At the end of the day, if we’re shortening seasons, it’s much more likely to be calendar-focused than conference-focused. You want to protect the best games. You’d hate to modify the calendar that took a really good game out of Week 10 and eliminated it because you’ve created an artificial limitation on one group playing another.”
Notre Dame is scheduled to host Clemson on Nov. 7 in potentially the program’s biggest home game in 15 years. That’s Week 10 of the college football calendar.
Bottom line, if Notre Dame doesn’t have a football schedule to play, it’ll be because nobody else does either. Swarbrick’s main point on this question is that rewriting the schedule in June, instead of playing out what can be played out as planned, doesn’t make a lot of sense. If games get dropped, he believes they’ll be early-season games, regardless of whether they’re conference games or not.
The ACC and Big Ten both have conference games in Week 1.
“There’s a lack of appreciation of how challenging it is to move football teams,” Swarbrick said. “The logistics of having the charter already arranged, the hotel booked. If you get into the mid-summer and try and change those things, that’s a real challenge.”
As for Notre Dame’s scheduled trip to Ireland to face Navy, Swarbrick said Notre Dame and Navy continue to explore alternatives but aren’t in a rush to move on them. Notre Dame’s ability or inability to play a college football game on Aug. 29 may be settled before the call gets made to Swarbrick’s desk.
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“It’s so downstream from these other decisions,” he said. “If college football isn’t starting on time, you’ve answered the question. If we didn’t open for the start of the fall semester, we’ve answered the question about that game. We need a lot more information.”
How would a spring football season work?
Playing a regular season during the spring semester would be the most disruptive of college football’s options but still better than no season at all. How would games be broadcast by networks already showing other live sporting events? Would it be feasible to play college football during March Madness? How would the NFL adjust its draft schedule, from the combine to the actual event, to accommodate college football?
If college football were played during the spring semester, would seniors with NFL prospects participate? What about juniors who are likely first-round picks, like Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence? Would they skip the season? Would they get drafted during the season?
“That particular (challenge), working with the NFL, feels like something you could work out,” Swarbrick said. “Maybe a recognition that some students may choose not to participate because of the calendar. But those all feel like manageable consequences.”
The idea of college players logging 26 games in one calendar year would be a concern, but a concern many coaches believe can be accommodated. And for all the disruption that would accompany a spring football season — does it start in January? March? Is April too late? — the upside of waiting until 2021 to play the 2020 season is compelling.
“Its greatest benefit of course is you’re very likely to be in a better position with health and safety,” Swarbrick said. “You might have or be a lot closer to a vaccine. You have much better data on the spread of the disease and how much the risk has abated. Your information improves dramatically, and that’s its greatest asset.”
A semester delay in the football season would also assuage one of Swarbrick’s bigger concerns, one he’s heard vocalized in meetings with conference commissioners and other athletics directors. Whenever football comes back, football players need to come back to full training first. Kelly has said Notre Dame needs about eight weeks to prepare for the season, which means if the team can report back to campus on July 1, it would be ready to play Navy on Aug. 29. Swarbrick agrees with that timeline.
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“There’s very much a player-health-and-safety-first approach here, followed closely by the health of the spectator. But that makes for a much more common in meetings,” Swarbrick said. “No one is going to be willing to take a shortcut on preparation before the season.”
(Photo: Chris Williams / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)