NBC’s Bevacqua to Take Notre Dame AD Reins From Jack Swarbrick
NBC Sports Group chairman Pete Bevacqua is leaving the company to lead the athletics department at his alma mater, Notre Dame. He succeeds outgoing athletic director Jack Swarbrick, who has held the top job at the university since 2008.
While no fixed date for Swarbrick’s departure was announced, he is expected to step down within the first quarter of 2024. Bevacqua is set to set up shop in South Bend on July 1, and he will serve as a special assistant for athletics to Notre Dame president Rev. John Jenkins. Swarbrick will guide Bevacqua as he makes the shift from sports-media boss to Fighting Irish AD.
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The milestones of Swarbrick’s tenure at Notre Dame include establishing membership in the ACC while retaining the football program’s independent status and leading the school to 10 national titles. Under Swarbrick, the school boasted exceptionally high athlete graduation rates, as Notre Dame finished among the top three schools in every year of his 15-year stint as AD.
Swarbrick was also one of the engineers of the new 12-team College Football Playoff structure, which kicks off in 2024.
“This is an unbelievable honor for me and a dream come true,” Bevacqua said in a statement released Thursday morning. “With the exception of my family, nothing means more to me than the University of Notre Dame.”
Bevacqua has served as the chairman of NBC Sports since 2018, where he managed a portfolio of top-tier assets that includes the NFL’s Sunday Night Football package, Summer and Winter Olympics, English Premier League, NASCAR and, of course, NBC’s exclusive and longstanding (33 years and counting) broadcast deal with his alma mater.
Bevacqua’s shift to Notre Dame should likely dispel any talk that the Irish may look to move on from its long association with NBC. Under the school’s current contract, which runs through the end of next season, NBC pays $22 million per year for the home-game rights. A renewal has been pegged as high as $75 million per year.
Among Bevacqua’s most recent accomplishments at NBC are hashing out a seven-year deal to establish a new Big Ten Saturday Night football window, and securing an 11-year extension of the network’s NFL contract.
Bevacqua has worked closely with Swarbrick during his stint at NBC and will continue to do so as he eases into the AD role. While a replacement for Bevacqua has yet to be identified, his responsibilities in the near term will be assumed by Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBCUniversal television and streaming.
Prior to joining NBC in 2018, Bevacqua was CEO of the PGA of America. He began his career as a corporate law associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York after earning his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center in 1997.
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