If Jack Swarbrick hadn't fully grasped the unique difference between being athletic director at Notre Dame and every other job he had ever had, it became excruciatingly clear after leaving Palo Alto that night last November.
Notre Dame's football team had just lost its fourth straight and final game of the 2009 season to Stanford, 45-38, and the question of whether head coach Charlie Weis would be fired—for weeks the topic of analysis by sports commentators—was a foregone conclusion. All the more reason, evidently, for every reporter, blogger and fan with Internet access to be mining for new stories.
"Following the game, I walked through gaggles of probably 50 to 80 reporters, boarded the team bus, rode the bus to the airport and very publicly boarded the plane to South Bend," recalls Swarbrick, Notre Dame's AD since July 2008. "When I got there, a major online site reported that I had stayed in Palo Alto to interview [Stanford Coach] Jim Harbaugh."
He hadn't, of course. But for Swarbrick, JD '80, the episode was another bit of education about the intensity of a job in the fish-bowl arena of Fighting Irish football. Prior to coming to Notre Dame, says Swarbrick, "The most emotional and stressful thing I ever did was to relocate the NCAA [headquarters] to Indianapolis" [from Overland Park, Kan., in June 1999] when he was chairman of the Indiana Sports Corp. In that instance, he says, "I felt like I had the responsibility of the community on my shoulders. . . . But the difference in the Notre Dame job is to be walking down the street in San Francisco and have someone out of the blue walk up and ask about the football program."
And not just ask, but likely demand to know what is being done to make it better. With 11 consensus national championships and a storied history that includes some of college football's greatest legends, Notre Dame plays in a league of its own. But its last championship came in 1988, and four different head coaches have come and gone in the past decade. The Fighting Irish's golden glow has dimmed, and pressure is mounting for a turnaround.
For all of Swarbrick's experience—which ranges from his time as partner in one of the largest law firms in Indiana to serving as general counsel of numerous national Olympic governing bodies—the fact that he had never before been an athletic director made his hiring at Notre Dame unorthodox and a surprise to many.
"Looking at the traditional university ADs, my initial reaction was that he was a very smart, very able guy but not a fit, and I didn't pursue it," says Notre Dame president, the Rev. John Jenkins, who first heard about Swarbrick in a discussion with then-NCAA president Myles Brand. "But people continued to mention his name and I suggested a dinner on campus. That dinner and that conversation turned my thinking around."
Jenkins says it became apparent to him that the increasing complexities of the athletic director's job and the challenge to maintain the school's academic standards while pursuing athletic excellence required someone with Swarbrick's qualifications. "I don't want an AD who spends all his time thinking about various defenses the football team is running. That's the football coach's job," says Jenkins, who graduated from Notre Dame in the same 1976 class as Swarbrick but did not know him as a student. "You need someone above that but who cares, who looks at the broader vision, understands the role of sports in the community and the complexities of the media . . . . Particularly at a place like Notre Dame, we need someone with the broad skills that Jack has."
Swarbrick had to be assured that he would have total autonomy. His predecessor, Kevin White, had opposed the firing of football coach Ty Willingham in 2004, but Willingham was let go anyway. The hiring of head football coach Brian Kelly last winter, which Swarbrick calls his "proudest moment" on the job, left no doubt about who was in charge.
"The process involved two people, no search committee, no group of trustees, just myself and Father Jenkins," Swarbrick says. "For the 10 days I engaged in the search, nobody knew where I was but my family, my secretaries, my deputy AD and the search firm I was working with. I got a different cell phone for the search, checked into hotels under aliases and booked my own flights. . . .
"I knew we had a leak-proof process. I knew Father John was not going to talk. So I could say to the coaches, if your name leaks I know it came from you and then I'm not interested."
Kelly, the former coach at Cincinnati who had his own reasons for wanting the process to be confidential, also appreciated Swarbrick's methods and integrity.
"Having been down that road before with other high-profile jobs, I don't want to say it was refreshing, but I gained a lot of confidence and trust in Jack with the way that was handled," Kelly says.
Notre Dame's high academic standards are often cited as a reason for the football's team recent shortcomings. But Swarbrick's conversation with Kelly on that topic was short and unequivocal. "It went like this," Kelly says. "Jack said, 'There are things here that will never change and that's not open to negotiation' and he laid them out. Then he said, 'Are you still interested?'"
The irony of Swarbrick's career is that he never anticipated being involved in sports at all. He came back to Indianapolis because of the opportunity for community involvement afforded by the law firm he joined. Indianapolis had just launched its amateur sports initiative, and his desire to run an enterprise led him to such ventures as director of competition for the 1987 Pan American Games, and securing rights for the Big Ten conference basketball tournaments and the NCAA basketball Final Four.
"I was a labor lawyer and loved it," says Swarbrick, who still lives in Indianapolis with his wife, Kimberly, and their high school-aged children Cal and Chris. (The couple also has two grown children, Kate and Connor.) "Then my career went in another direction. But the skills I developed as a lawyer and the things I learned in law school serve me very well in jobs like this one."
Swarbrick has embraced his latest challenge with gusto, but he has plenty of question marks ahead. Can Kelly turn around the football team? Should Notre Dame abandon its independent status and join a conference? Is a national championship still a realistic goal? The nation will be watching, and Swarbrick knows it.
"Very few people," he says, "are neutral about Notre Dame."
MELISSA ISAACSON is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune and the author of Sweet Lou, a biography of baseball manager Lou Piniella.
