Friday at 4: Notre Dame's football future will be most determined by President Fr. John Jenkins's successor

Two weeks ago, Notre Dame announced University President Fr. John Jenkins will step down from his role in May. The news was far from unexpected, both in that he will be concluding his 20th year as University President and in that Notre Dame director of athletics Jack Swarbrick rather bluntly hinted at its coming when he announced his own resignation in the summer.

“It’s important for Father John to make the selection of the next AD, because I don’t know how much longer he’s going to go,” Swarbrick said to Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde.

When Swarbrick made public the plan to hand over the reins of the athletic department to then-NBC Sports Chairman Pete Bevacqua, there was brief consideration about removing the previous quote from this space’s article on the coming transition, one effective in early 2024. That was quickly and firmly pushed back against because Notre Dame’s effort to find its next president will have more impact on the Irish football program than any other development across the next decade.

Jenkins’s replacement will hold more influence on the Notre Dame football program than Bevacqua, even as the latter negotiates the next television deal, one widely expected to at least double, if not triple, the money the university collects on football broadcasts.

Jenkins’s replacement will determine the Playoff success of the Irish more than any head coach, be that Marcus Freeman for years to come or anyone who may replace him.

In many ways, there is no single individual with as much power in college football as Notre Dame’s president, rightly or wrongly. He is the only individual on the College Football Playoff Board of Managers unbeholden to a conference, each of the other 10 explicitly representing one of the 10 conferences, just as Swarbrick is and Bevacqua will be the only member of the College Football Playoff Management Committee free of a conference, the other 10 members all being conference commissioners.

As college football faces its coming changes, the Board of Managers and Management Committee will have little impact; they already used their influence to create the 12-team Playoff beginning next season. But Jenkins’s successor will be the one to set the tone on Notre Dame’s usage of the transfer portal and the one to decide how to respond to student-athlete employment.

The former is already a hot topic around Irish football, Freeman struggling to bring in underclassmen transfers while most of the rest of the country reloads rosters with them. But that will not be the make-or-break item.

How Notre Dame approaches student-athlete employment will define the future of Irish football, and Jenkins and Swarbrick always struck a hard line, at least until recently as that inevitability became more and more clear.

“I don’t think there’s a compulsion or some demand of justice that we [share football revenue with players],” Jenkins said to The New York Times in 2015, an article that then pondered what would come if college football players enjoyed an open market.

“That’s when we leave,” Jenkins said. “We will not tolerate that. Then it really does become a semipro team.”

Looking around now, eight years later, college football is as akin to an open market as rain is to snow. In a few weeks, with temperatures a few degrees cooler, inevitability will set in.

Jenkins and Swarbrick co-authored an opinion column in The New York Times this past March, arguing to hem in the usage of name, image and likeness rights that have turned into pay-for-play opportunities — hello, current Notre Dame starting quarterback Sam Hartman — while still keeping NIL rights, as originally intended, available.

“The claim that student-athletes otherwise get nothing from a multibillion-dollar college sports industry is false — and the misperception behind it goes to the heart of what is at stake,” they wrote. “If a talented high school player heads straight to the minor leagues, he earns a paycheck. If he goes instead to college, he can earn something far more valuable: a degree. …

“Congress, too, must act to resolve conflicting state regulations, clarify that our athletes are students, not employees, and give the N.C.A.A. the ability to enact and enforce rules for fair recruiting and compensation.”

Setting aside the increasing calculus that college degrees are worth less and less of a return on investment, and setting aside the tuition bubble that has financially crippled many college graduates this century, and setting aside the enrollment cliff rapidly approaching higher education that has every administration in the country trying to shore up its finances, each change in Jenkins’s and Swarbrick’s rhetoric has reflected the coming reality: College football players will be paid before much longer.

The television contracts have gotten too big. The travel now demanded is too exhausting for athletes as conferences stretch from New Jersey to Los Angeles, from Miami to San Francisco, from West Virginia to Phoenix. And the Supreme Court was too one-sided when it ruled 9-0 against the NCAA in NCAA v. Alston, removing a cap on non-cash education-related benefits due to antitrust law, setting an expected precedent that the NCAA is teetering on violating antitrust law as it keeps players from receiving fair market value.

The NCAA is wary of any other case reaching the Supreme Court, lest it be smacked further, and thus has turned to the cohesive and collaborative body of Congress to save its grip on all the finances.

Keep in mind, the NCAA is not an organization itself but a member organization, one doing as its members dictate, those members being the schools. And keep in mind, those schools are largely gathered in subsets — conferences — with one notable exception.

Thus, Jenkins’s replacement will have the loudest single voice in driving the NCAA forward, and when the day comes that Congress laughs at supposed amateruism or Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is able to voice his concurring opinion — so, not the majority of the Supreme Court back in 2021 but roughly parallel to it — that antitrust laws “should not be a cover for exploitation of the student athletes,” then Jenkins’s replacement will be the one to decide if Notre Dame will follow through on Jenkins’s threat to leave the top tier of college football when athletes are paid their fair market value.

That will impact Irish football more than any transfer quarterback, more than any head coach, more than any television contract.

The greatest likelihood was Jenkins was trying to posture, dig his heels in, perhaps even bluff. That would be Lobbying 101. But the tides have continued to shift against that mindset and against the NCAA. Kavanaugh is one of the staunchest conservatives on the Supreme Court, so when he broke away from some of his colleagues to point out the NCAA may have to worry about “serious questions under the antitrust laws,” that represented the NCAA losing one of its loudest anti-labor voices.

Earlier this month Swarbrick hoped Congress may develop a collective bargaining system for NCAA student-athletes in which they are somehow not employees but bargaining over compensation, benefits, hours, etc.

In other words, they would be employees.

That day will come.

Before it does, Jenkins will wrap up his 20 years in the Golden Dome, years marked by Notre Dame growing its endowment, controversially inviting President Barack Obama to be a commencement speaker, not inviting President Donald Trump for the same gig, expanding campus and drastically raising tuition more than 200 percent.

Notre Dame Stadium’s profile changed entirely halfway through his tenure, two head football coaches were fired while the men’s and women’s basketball teams enjoyed prolonged years of continuity.

Jenkins’s 20 years as Notre Dame President can be remembered in a dozen different ways and then some, as should be expected from the third-longest tenure in school history behind only founder Rev. Edward Sorin (1868-1893) and Rev. Ted Hesburgh (1952-87). His successor’s term will be most and quickly defined by how Irish football handles player employment, an overdue inevitability.

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