It didn’t take Jack Swarbrick long to succinctly capture his college athletics realignment thoughts.
During an appearance on the “Dan Patrick Show” on Wednesday, Swarbrick, Notre Dame’s Vice President and Director of Athletics, fielded a question that asked him to summarize what has unfolded throughout college football — with the Pac-12 all but nonexistent as programs, such as Oregon and Washington recently, bolt for other conferences.
“A complete disaster,” Swarbrick said.
Swarbrick and the Fighting Irish, members of the Atlantic Coast Conference for everything except football, have supported the possibility of Stanford and California — two of the four remaining Pac-12 schools after Oregon, Washington, UCLA and USC shifted to the Big Ten, while Arizona, Arizona State and Utah left for the Big 12 — joining the ACC despite logistical obstacles.
“I think the decision-making 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,” Swarbrick said. “We have to try and make it work. I mean, we’ve been pretty vocal in the past month about we need to find a home for Stanford and Cal. You can’t have two of the great academic institutions in the world not have a place to play.”
The conference realignment dominos started to fall when Texas and Oklahoma revealed their plan to depart for the SEC, a move that’ll become official in 2024.
Then, the Trojans and Bruins decided to join the Big Ten — which, at the time, stretched westward to only Nebraska — the following summer.
But over the past two months, college athletics has endured a perplexing series of departures that has made conferences’ futures more difficult to dissect.
When asked if the latest movement will cause the Pac-12 to die, Swarbrick — who’d previously announced his intent to retire in 2024, just as most of the conference movement begins — said it’s “looking that way more and more every day.”
He called for increased regional scheduling during the interview Wednesday, while also adding that he doesn’t think college athletes need to become university employees, either.
“They’re certainly based on money,” Swarbrick said about the recent decisions altering the college athletics landscape, though he dodged Patrick’s “greed” description. “There’s no question. 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.”
In addition to Stanford and Cal, SMU also emerged as a possible addition to the ACC, according to ESPN, and 12 for the 15 schools already in the conference would need to vote in favor of the new member.