on my non-football bona fides here, other than to note that I damn near got frostbite staffing ND baseball in the late-70's in the open-air and shaded Jake Kline Field press box, chronicling a team whose entire starting outfield batted under .200 once my roommate broke his hand and was lost for the season during "the" spring trip. I also worked the first ND varsity women's basketball game in 1977 and then accepted Sharon's Petro challenge to volunteer as the team's primary SID rep two years later.
I'll start by saying that I think Notre Dame should provide sufficient resources for every varsity team it fields to legitimately compete for conference championships on a regular basis. I'll acknowledge that the ceiling is getting murkier by the day in all sports due to pay-to-play in its various forms, which makes that proposition a little more difficult to gauge and embrace (which is also true in football, further exacerbating the situation).
To the extent that Notre Dame isn't doing that in all sports, my beef is with Notre Dame, not the football program.
But if N is some number less than maximum or optimal resources for all sports and also represents Notre Dame's self-imposed ceiling on spending on athletics, then I unapologetically want every resource necessary devoted to football, even to the detriment of other sports.
Again, the culprit in that scenario is Notre Dame's administration, not Notre Dame football -- or, I'd argue, Notre Dame alumni and football fans who share my view.
My reasoning: (1) The obvious, Notre Dame football is Notre Dame football. No other sport could ever occupy its place within Notre Dame because no other sport remotely approaches what Notre Dame football, over the years, has meant to the University and its students and alumni.
(2) The drought: 38 years and counting. The fact that for much of those 38 years Notre Dame has voluntarily tied at least one hand behind its back while it paid lip service to football excellence makes the drought even worse, leading me to ...
(3) The uniqueness of Notre Dame's current opportunity. We would make a huge mistake to assume that just because Notre Dame is willing to pour a shit-ton of money into football means that Notre Dame will be similarly positioned to legitimately compete for a national championship as it is under Marcus Freeman.
Knowing that I'll have to duck some empties, Freeman is the best representative of Notre Dame among its head football coaches since Parseghian. (Yes, Holtz still exceeds Freeman in the nuts-and-bolts of coaching -- and certainly was an excellent representative of Notre Dame while here.)
But whatever prop bet you want to offer that measures Freeman's recruiting production vs. his successor (or the next several successors), or whether his successor (or next several successors) reaches the national title game ... I'll take Freeman.
Freeman gets Notre Dame and he has mastered using Notre Dame's uniqueness to recruit and build a program.
So while I don't view myself as a "want it now" kind of guy, the window is almost certainly closing when Freeman leaves. I'll be damned if I want Freeman limited to any extent by our "need" to cut baseball or softball or basketball or any other damn sport a bigger slice of the pie in pursuit of mediocrity, especially when the pie is artificially suppressed by ND's BOT or whomever.
So, put me in the "fund everybody fully, but above all do not deprive football of anything it needs" camp