You can sell the idea that a championship level football team is bringing significant money into the athletic program, and probably helping to bankroll many of the non-revenue sports. From that angle, the juice is definitely worth the squeeze, and will (presumably) continue to be so as the "purses" associated with advancing in the playoffs and winning a championship will also continue to increase.

It will be interesting to see what happens if Marcus can pick off a title or two in his time here, and whether getting to the mountaintop will result in ND stepping back the level of contribution to the football team, or whether success in football might beget efforts to be more successful in other sports as well.

The entire front porch of the university and all that. I get it. I understand it. The amount of money that is at stake, the rest is the cost of doing business.

Basketball just hasn't been that for anyone, even the blue bloods, over the years.
I'd like to say "It's one Final Four, what could it cost 20 Million Dollars" but my brain just cant wrap my head around it. Decades of "1 and Done" and whatever the tournament is becoming, it just reads like expensive softball.

where the faculty and staff are generally well-compensated, the academic facilities are top-notch, and the financial aid packages are robust (at least recently) than it does at other schools, where none of the above is true.

Granted, I'm not sure anything about big-time college sports can be squared with the Idea of a University, but the American academy left that idea for dead a long time ago, so c'est la vie.

Definitely understand that it's probably even "per impact player" but the total investment is still multiples.

Just seeing it boiled down to "college kid signs new 2 year 7-8 figure deal" is some uncanny valley stuff for a non-pro league

..at multiples of that. According to John Brice, ND football's roster is in the $30-$35 MM range (still free agent gross but not egregious relative to the field or other sports).

https://www.reddit.com/r/CFB/comments/1qd4h4v/john_brice_notre_dame_is_spending_30_35_m...

If you consider that football has 100+ players they are paying for, football isn't really multiples of anything that the basketball cognoscenti are whining about.

is that Shrewsberry has yet to prove that he can field a competitive team featuring three guys who are going to get paid $10.5MM. Hell, he still has yet to be beat a single top-25 opponent in three years on the job. Not great, Bob!

I appreciate that this predicament can be viewed as a 'chicken/egg' scenario, but I also get the impression that maybe NDMBB wouldn't be getting nickel & dimed right now if the anticipated ROI on money sunk into the program wasn't so discouraging. Certainly, basketball is not football at ND, but it's clear that financial support for the latter has ramped up significantly as Freeman's tenure has progressed and he's justified the commitment made to him. Perhaps the whole situation feels counterintuitive, but everyone should probably brace themselves for 2026-27 to be a sink-or-swim campaign for the current HC.

I can't hide that football is operating at multiples of this, but seeing it just laid out here like we're reading free agency / transfer window news puts a pin in a lot of it for me.

College basketball used to be an absolute joy, even when ND was scrappy enough to be in the tournament with a few bounces. This and the 76 team thing is just pointing all of that to super league in a way that is somehow faster and more reckless than football.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that we're not getting the whole story about he and Shrews, and (potentially) how his departure cleared the way for continued starting minutes for a certain someone...

But I'm with you on everything else.

Apologies for the broken record on this...

For a small moment, let's pretend that $10MM/year is the going rate for fielding competitive basketball team.

These were ND's best 3 players for a team that went 13-18 overall and 4-14 in conference.

Yes, I understand that Burton only played 10 games but is Tom Noie trying to convince us that ND should have ponied up $10.5MM to roll this shit show back? GTFOH.

You can't have it all of these different ways. ND is never going to set the market. Shit, they don't in football and ND's 2 highest draft picks just told us that. But don't whine about the money when the money wouldn't do shit in this particular situation. It'd be an expensive investment for a bottom feeder ACC team.