I don’t know how I feel about Bevacqua. I don’t know him, nor anyone who knows him.
On the one hand, it makes sense to bring in someone who intimately understands the economics of TV contacts and how to maximize revenue from TV. The old days of a former beloved athlete like a Moose Krause having that seat are gone. There is constant conference re-alignment, streaming contracts, different conference affiliations for different sports – it is a demanding job, you need to be super smart anymore to be AD of a major school, or you’re going to cost your school millions of dollars.
He’s a Domer, so that makes sense. I don’t know if he was an athlete or not. Seems the right age. New Yorker, so I don’t see him relocating to South Bend full-time, but maybe he will.
On the other hand, I hate the fact that Jack got to pick his successor – much as I predicted he would. Sometimes you can read a lot in a photo – he looks like a typical New York TV executive asshole (link).
But you don’t get that top NBC job without being competitive and super smart – unless he had some family connection I don’t know about.
I don’t know what it says about the perhaps-too-cozy relationship with NBC.
If I were other media outlets I might look at this as “Well, NBC is just locked in for the duration”. I don’t know how long the current NBC contract goes.
If I’m NBC I’m cocking a big eyebrow, though. Was this guy negotiating with ND at arms’ length, or was this job dangled in front of him as he was dealing with us? It’s like an Illinois state lawmaker who leaves and goes to work for ComEd.
Or conversely was he dispatched to South Bend by NBC to “fix ND football”, because it’s a valuable NBC property and it has been under-performing?
One thing for sure, ND A.D. is a less-glamorous job than the one he’s leaving behind, which is interesting. And as much as it pays, he was probably making huge coin at NBC.
He has no loyalty to Freeman, so the leash was just shortened there.
Let’s see how it plays out.
Not move to Sourh Bend from New York permanently? He damn well better.
ND Athletic Director a less glamorous job than the NBC job? How’s that? Swarbrick was well compensated and matters. Who’s ever heard of Bevacqua before now except insiders?
Interesting point about him maybe selecting himself on behalf of NBC to fix ND football. I hope that’s not the case, a compromise of university independence.
I like that he may not have loyalty to Freeman in case a change is needed there.
...and have to say this probably is where I come down as well, especially your points on the current requirements of the job and the unseemliness of not keeping Swarbrick at arms' length in the succession plans.
I would also add the fact that Fr. Jenkins' contract is not expected to be renewed next year as well, so it's possible Bevacqua is going to end up working for someone who didn't hire him. So I find it equally unseemly that the new President is going to be saddled with an AD hire already made.
Any idea as to possible replacement for Fr. Jenkins
Vice President and Associate Provost - Rev. Dan Groody, CSC
We have an AD make lame duck hires on his way out for both of the most important head coaching positions in ND athletics, thus depriving his handpicked successor of that responsibility in the near term.
And we have a University President make a lame duck hire on HIS way out, picking an AD who is likely expected to run athletics for a decade after his (Jenkins) departure.
24 months from now you'll have relatively new and young faces at University President, A.D., head football coach, and head basketball coach - none of whom have any loyalty to the others.
he will have my full support. Wait, I might ask for a few other things: (1) pledge never again to schedule a Div II team; (2) pledge to immediately terminate any football coach who loses to Marshall, Tulsa, Conn, or Navy; (3) take immediate steps to return to fb schedules that are worth the investment of time and money to attend games; (4) shitcan the night games.
I think your arguments in the lines above are, as Mike says, intriguing. Also, on the mark.
to attend games. I’ll add to that — games that are even worth watching on TV. If I was living in DC this year, I can’t imagine spending $2000 to get to Central Michigan game? No way. September 16 will likely be a beautiful day on campus and the game is against Central Michigan.
And he did nothing at his previous post to stop the perverting of several hundred young girls. Why would Jenkins abandon his fair-haired boy from Stanford Law now?
You have to wonder about the makeup of the PTB that Savvy's still here.
before I pass judgment. Nothing against Boo.
mirrors reality.
The prior AD’s most recent two hires seem talented.
Both seem talented recruiters
You’ve expressed you’re a fan of football coach
Can’t imagine any bitching about men’s basketball at this point
Maybe there is someone out there that knows more than you ? Who knew ??
He elevated a fucking coordinator to the head coach role.
Hires don't get any easier than that.
"The prior AD’s most recent two hires seem talented." What does that mean?
First, you don't really know, and second you only reference the two most recent hires.
Setting aside the second point, this is Notre Dame. Should we be hiring a head football coach who "seems talented"? Is that the measure now? "Hey, this guy might be good?"
At least viewed that way at the time of hiring, and then lived up to it. I’ll name one: Lou Holtz. That’s it. That’s the list.
Even Frank Leahy had been a head coach for only two years.
Ara had a career record at Northwestern one game over .500 and was coming off a 5-4 season.
Dan Devine had a terrific college coaching record but was coming off a rather lackluster one in the NFL.
It might be wise to wait and see at least a tiny bit.
Shrewsberry which, of course, has nothing to do with my post.
Methuselah has never been vituperative in his short Notre Dame interwebs life.
Doherty no prior HC experience? Brey had HC experience at…Delaware. Shrewsberry 2 years HC at Penn State. McLeod…NBA HC experience.
is the exact same thing as saying this guy is a bad hire.
I'm just tweaking Andy because he has long argued that leeway should be granted to alums and there are 50 replies here that refuse to grant any.
You can be upset about the process but Bevacqua deserves your support.
professional sport team. ND men basketball recruited exceptionally in the limited period coach had. Why doesn’t savvy Jack get a check mark for that hire?
Marcus was DC, so shit, that wasn’t tough ? That’s the reasoning why savy Jack blows. Even he couldn’t screw that one up?
Yep. He couldda hired our OC.
I’ve been a fan and student during Devine/Faust headed football with Digger’s wife my legal writing instructor ; and coach Phelps a frequent visitor to the law school to meet and great ; and bullshit with student body.
Savvy Jack had few if any fans on this site.
His hires are doing the initial necessary work successfully of for the most part getting the athlete student they want/require. Give each 2/3 years. Judge them then
Hell. What about the woman baseball hire. He screw that up too? I think that was/will be a grand slam ! I get it. Who gives a rats ass about women basketball . I do. Probably one of college sports fastest growing sports of popularity .
Critize when warranted. The guy is gone . Let the body get cold.
Give the new guy at least a month or 2 before his hire declared a clunker
Be well
You mean when he hired Muffet McGraw's hand picked successor, whom she had been grooming for the position for years?
Okay...
Women's baseball?
Recent hire?
Yes, he would fuck that hire up as well. Go back to drowning your Celtic sorrows in your bud light, Mrs. Swarbrick.
and women's basketball.
If you lot want to jump on the guy's shit for being dim, you may want to sharpen your own sleuthing skills first. Outsmart the autocrat.
themselves so poorly in writing while possessing insight or credibility worth taking consideration of.
I do like those Celtics, though.
to be fair, I was rooting for them as well, but Law83's celebration after game 6 was pretty obnoxious. It was quite humorous watching them fall on their face the next game.
express glee they lost ? You Savvy jt you !
Get a life clown
it was funny. It's still funny.
Funny like a clown. You amuse me.
As a Celtics fan.
Law was like the guy in the dugout after 7 innings of no hit ball. “Hey, you see what our pitcher is doing? Would be cool to be part of a no hitter”
🙄
an uNDefeated sweatshirt for Christmas. She had lost or donated or thrown away the sweatshirt I had had for 20 years.
I shaved off thousands of years of purgatory that day by hiding undetected my dismay and anger and instead genuinely thanking her for what she understood to be a thoughtful gift. It may be my peak achievement of generosity, never to be rivaled.
Made it to the conference finals in his first year!
He gets it!
Shrewsbury hasn't coached a game. People are hopeful, and in fairness I haven't seen any complaints about the choice, but it's hardly the time for a victory lap.
The OC hire was a disaster, which there is nearly unanimous agreement about.
Baseball appears to be headed back into the dumpster.
Freeman enjoys strong support, but, again, any sort of victory lap would be very premature.
So, again, exactly what recent hires by Swarbrick distinguish him from a replacement-level AD?
It’s never premature to take a victory lap. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get media to ask you how it felt to win a race you never ran.
Lap dog, kiss ass....give me a break.
You can dislike the hire because it came in the same statement as Swarbrick's departure and he came from one of ND long-time partners....I get that. Moreover, you can criticize his lack of high-level sports administration experience.
At the same time this guy graduated ND with highest honors, GT Law into Davis Polk before running the sports division of CAA. From there he was the head of the PGA before moving to NBC. These are not failing up positions.
I side with alumni v the administration and against foes, external and internal. I know that there are elements at ND and always have been that are toxic. Eg, Ann Firth, Tom Streit, Mark Poor man, Bill Kirk, Blowchow, Wadsworth, Swarbrick, the lace curtains on the BOT.
I know nothing about Bevaqua. Which is a little peculiar. I expect I will know a great deal more about him soon.
Swarbrick obviously saw a lot of himself in him. Swarbrick's prioritieswere equal parts advancing himself and his kin, and currying favor with with his brethren among the Conference commissioners and ND's vendors. And that is what they are. Vendors and sponsors. Not partners. Swarbrick was never that interested in running a championship football program.
yes, that's the sum total of his qualifications.
Criticism of the man himself is unfounded
Standards for hiring. Now maybe there was a national search and this guy won the process. But it looks a lot like a deal crafted by Savvy on a golf course - maybe at Seminole where Pete B and Jimmy D belong - and one wonders what other guarantees and deals were made.
I think it is fair to criticize his qualifications based on the fact that he's never done the job. I'd love for Jenkins go explain to me - and I am sure he has a good explanation ready - why someone who never worked in college athletics administration should be AD.
I do think this enhances the need to have an AD of just football. Someone solely focused on its success on the field to whom the Coach and support staff report.
Rosenthal, Wadsworth, Swarbrick and Bevacqua. It’s almost like it’s part of the job description - “no prior sports administration experience preferred.”
This has been par for the course for most of ND's significant hires over the past few years, with the possible exception of Shrewsberry.
The vitriol can deservedly be pointed at ND. Not Bevacqua, a fellow alum who by all accounts has a stellar professional reputation. I certainly wouldn't call him a "lap dog kiss ass" for having the gall to accept a dream job that he was likely underqualified for.
...taking an executive from the network that holds your TV contract is more than a little suspicious, especially when no search was conducted. He was picked to keep the status quo, to keep the money coming in based on alumni and fan base loyalty rather than commitment to winning. ND needed to do a nationwide search. If they wanted an alum, there are several good candidates who have experience in running a sports program. Instead, they took someone who has no experience in running such a program but does have corporate experience. He's the perfect guy to run a hedge fund sports program. College sports are changing rapidly, and any program needs someone who recognizes this and can adapt, not a corporate hack who wants the status quo.
Which means when you're hiring a coach, there's no need for an exhaustive national search that just wastes time and more importantly, money. Sure, a cursory search with whatever names appear in your Twitter feed might be helpful and looks professional. But if those names don't pan out, it's cool. Your guy will be just an HR transfer form away."
I was friends with him, back in the day, as well. I haven’t kept in touch with him since the mid-90s, but have closely followed his career. A really good dude who would kill it at ND. My guess is that he’s the kind of guy that Sorenuts and Jenkins would not choose. Too down to earth and too much common sense.
The mission is just to be competitive enough to keep the revenue flowing.
Hiring Bevacqua makes perfect sense from the University's perspective, an ideal candidate to meet their goals.
You (and many other ND alums, I suspect) have quite different goals, and as such, consider Boo Corrigan (or similar) to be an ideal candidate.
Can you edify the rest of us?
2. Maintain demand for media content to support broader university branding goals.
Everything else is really subservient to these goals.
primarily support a bloated athletic staff that largely serves no real purpose and also support women's sports, which serve a purpose but it is one that the University itself should be picking up the tab for and not the football program/players.
so they can make more money. Doing what's in the best interest of student-athletes isn't at the top of the list.
...or in this case, less for a greater price.
The so-called magic of "brand equity".
You only by the wrapper, not what's inside.
to deliver mediocre football. They must have a truly unique approach to branding.
And our schedule?
There are plenty of people who can be milked right now. In the long haul you can't sell nostalgia to people who weren't alive to see it. Brands die in the long haul if the underlying product is mediocre.
Someone will remember that!
Isn't that enough? This board surely represents the most cynical and critical of us along the ND alum and fandom spectrum. And yet there were posts bemoaning the obstacles in getting tickets the minute they went on sale. If the queue was formed here, well, you get the point.
We could obviously hypothesize about how a stronger program would deliver more revenue. But when cash is already raining down so hard you can hear it on the windows, one might wonder if reaching for the hose spigot is worth getting off that comfy blue and gold couch.
But at the rate they are going there will come a time where there won't be many people alive that remember ND being good at football.
The point being I don't think they are a sustainable trajectory.
only focus on maximizing revenue RIGHT NOW. They don't care about legacy, and don't care much about the long term.
They need to police that behavior or Notre Dame is going drive off the cliff in the long haul.
We are heading towards New Coke territory.
They have hosted a tailgate with their friends for every home game since I believe 1981. My father-in-law has personally attended those tailgates (and I believe attended all those games) for all but about three of those home games, excepting only the birth of my wife and a couple of weddings. He used to have access both through the monogram club and through a donation society.
At some point in the recent past, he dropped the donation society and accessed only through the monogram club. After last week, I believe he has no plans to renew his monogram club dues after 40 years. There is no point. He might as well put those funds toward secondary market ticket costs to the usually 1 game that matters. And all other games have tickets freely available.
Now they still will attend games because they've committed too much over the years to permit themselves to now say all that time was wasted. So this is a slightly different issue than the one you present. But it reflects the bigger picture. They have changed their giving habits in response to those giving habits no longer being rewarded with ticket access. And this is perhaps a bigger cause for concern in measuring alumni engagement with the university. It is quite sad. I'm sure a short-term analysis was done on maximizing year 1 revenue. But it is driving away long-term engagement and revenue.
Where do you think winning a national championship in football ranks in their prioroties?
that can either yield lasting greatness or inevitable decline. This guy may turn out to be good, just as Coach Freeman may turn out to be great. But neither was the result of an appropriate process. And aside from yielding questionable results, flawed processes undermine confidence in an institution. I don't know where or when the first step was taken to start us down this road, or if there is any way back.
Since the transition may have been known for a long time, is it possible that Jenkins vetted a number of candidates? If we liked Swabrick, would have been a problem that he was involved in evaluating his successor?
For all I know, Bevacqua may turn out to be the best AD Notre Dame has ever had.
But particularly given the unassailable record of pursuing their own interests and self-aggrandizement, both Jenkins and Swarbrick deserve all the skepticism that may come their way for conducting an anointing rather than anything that resembles a search.
Swarbrick is on record claiming that's been around elite coaches for decades. Other than in passing, that's simply not true, Even to the extent that I'd agree that some of the age-group and national team coaches with whom he associated prior to arriving at Notre Dame were elite, their "job descriptions" diverge so materially from those of an elite college football or basketball coach that Swarbrick's associations are largely irrelevant.
He and Jenkins continue to disregard their fiduciary duty to Notre Dame, its students and alumni. Of course, here I don't mean in the classic attorney-client, financial advisor, etc., sense. But I mean that Notre Dame is not theirs to do as they please. The giants of the place -- Hesburgh, Joyce, Krause, Valdiserri, Corrigan -- all saw themselves as stewards of something far bigger than themselves. (See, for a non-Notre Dame example, Nick Saban stating that Alabama football is bigger than him when asked about modifying jerseys.)
It's sickening.
standards, excel, or work to convince others of what is possible and should be done. Just keep stuffing the coffers.
I remember hearing his name as a possibility back when Swarbrick was hired in 2008 (he had UCF and SMU ADs on his resume).
Too much disruption possibility?
orange thief.
...NC State. They've gotten very good in several sports that I don't recall them ever being real contenders in.
I'd much rather have someone like that than a sports entertainment executive with no experience running an athletic department.