God bless that man of God.
On Thursday evening, hours after the latest roundhouse right connected with the jaw of college athletics, there arrived an email from the outgoing Notre Dame president with his hope of where we go from here.
Though admirable, that 98-word, eight-line paragraph from The Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C. was shortsighted, penned apparently by someone who spent too much time under the Golden Dome dreaming of yesterday and not enough toiling in the salt mines of today’s college athletics.
In 2024, the university president’s statement in response to the House vs. NCAA settlement (more than $2.75 billion) that paves the way for student-athletes to get paid, was so 1994.
The settlement, though undesirable in many respects and promising only temporary stability, is necessary to avoid what would be the bankruptcy of college athletics,” Jenkins wrote.
College athletics long went bankrupt, at least morally. Notre Dame athletics isn’t about “four for 40” or “four or forever” or whatever sappy/snappy saying someone with the same education first ideals as Jenkins musters for that moment. There hasn’t been stability, however temporary, for years.
In April of 2018, Jenkins held an impromptu campus press conference with then-head men’s basketball coach Mike Brey and considered the game in “crisis.” Jenkins believed he could help fix it.
With Name, Image and Likeness, the transfer portal and constant roster reshuffle, college athletics aren’t any better six years later. Everything is an affront to amateurism as we once knew it.
How did we get here? Why are we here? Everyone’s to blame. Even Notre Dame.
Revenue sharing between schools and their student-athletes is coming. Student-athletes (does anyone still say that with a straight face?) as employees is coming. Notre Dame as an idyllic place solely for and of higher learning is going.
Jenkins also wrote of Congress needing to pass legislation “to save the great American institution of college sports.” He believes that college athletes can never be considered employees (too late) and wants rules written for those student-athletes (again, really athletes) to “help ensure competitive equity among our teams.”
All those fencers and rowers and swimmers nodded in agreement. Basketball and football players, many of whom already carry six-figure NIL deals — OK, salaries — shrugged.
As for Congress, it has more pressing matters than wading into the NCAA’s self-inflicted cesspool.
Jenkins means well for the institution where he earned his bachelor’s degree (1976) and his master’s (1978) and spent the last 19 years as president. But the belief that Notre Dame can and should and will be about the “student-athlete” is unbelievable.
For the five-star football recruit or the potential graduate transfer basketball player, it’s no longer just about a Notre Dame diploma. It’s about a certain financial number. Match it, and we’ve got a match. Don’t match it? Don’t worry. Some other school will.
It’s about the dollars that make the most sense.
This notion of Notre Dame student-athletes being more students and less athletes dissolved forever when graduate transfer quarterback Sam Hartman reportedly received more than $1 million in 2023. He didn’t do it to earn a graduate degree (did Hartman even set foot in a classroom?). He did it to win a lot of games (he didn’t) and chase a College Football Playoff spot.
Really, he did it to maximize his — and the school’s — earning potential.
At least Hartman lined his pockets despite only occasionally being able to operate from one.
This season, the Notre Dame football program has millions of dollars collectively invested in the head coach and the new graduate transfer quarterback and the offensive and defensive coordinators. It’s all by design. Not to boost the team grade-point average, but to chase the school’s first national championship since 1988.
They don’t roll out commemorative “shirts” (now just $25.99) every April for the economics department. They don’t print money faster than they make it at the bookstore for six campus-wide academic seminars every fall. Notre Dame may stand for higher education at the highest level, but for many, Notre Dame is about the big business of college athletics.
There’s a part of Notre Dame where education still matters, and it always will. There’s also a part where the student-athlete is now more athlete and less student. That’s college athletics in today’s world of NIL.
What’s NIL? It can be explained away as this and/or that, but call it what it is.
Pay. For. Play.
If you don’t think college athletes aren’t about getting paid, you’re getting played.
Notre Dame often has moved mountains (of dirt) and even roads to get what it wants. See Eddy Street Commons and Twyckenham Drive. Hear the constant cacophony of construction around campus. Out with the old, in with the new. Kind of like the college athletics blueprint.
No amount of what Jenkins hopes for will return college athletics to a simpler time. It’s too complex. Like Juniper Road that once bisected campus, those days are done.
You can say you agree with Jenkins and want to save college athletics. You can say you (still) believe in the notion of a student-athlete. You can say kids of today and tomorrow with unique God-given athletic ability can and will choose Notre Dame for the right (academic) reasons.
You can say that student-athletes never will be student-employees.
