Notre Dame's AD search has unique flavor

Editor's note: This analysis is reprinted with the permission of the South Bend Tribune.

SOUTH BEND - The University of Notre Dame issued a press release Wednesday, essentially announcing the school had nothing new to say on its now six-day-old search for a new athletic director.

It did confirm that search had actually commenced.

Yes, really.

It also confirmed that president Rev. John I. Jenkins is running the show. It did somehow manage to work in the word "constituencies."

The Internet version of the search is far more entertaining to follow, not the least of which is the fact that most of the information coming from it is written in either English or easy-to-follow Gibberish. Real and imagined candidates carry equal weight in cyberland. That's partly because Notre Dame's last three AD searches yielded the unlikely triumvirate of: someone outside the ND family (Duke-bound Kevin White), the Canadian ambassador to Ireland (the late Mike Wadsworth) and a banker (Dick Rosenthal). The latter two had no college sports administrative experience whatsoever, but full and fancy rȩsumȩs outside of it.

So why not Oprah Winfrey, Regis Philbin or Flavor Flav this time around?

The real wild card, though, in this half soap opera/half reality show is actually Jenkins. This is his first AD search, and one you would like to think he'd be determined to handle less clumsily than his first head football coaching purge (Tyrone Willingham, 2004).

More poignant than naming the flavor of the day is what Notre Dame should be looking for in a successor to White. That will, in large part, allow the casual fan to sift through the seemingly ever-growing list without having to check for a new blog entry every five minutes.

Slice open the search and look inside, and here's a cross-section of what you're likely to find less than one week in: Football and more football

The variable that can't be ignored in the search is football. And that significantly narrows the field.

There are three pillars that protect Notre Dame's football independence, something it has deemed worth protecting at least twice in the last decade. They are the school's strong presence at the Bowl Championship Series negotiating table, the NBC TV/football contract, and a stable - if not thriving - Big East Conference.

If any of those collapse, the new athletic director will likely be charged with finding a conference home for football and the other sports - and without the kind of leverage Notre Dame enjoys now.

The BCS position may be the most ticklish of the three. In the days before the Bowl Coalition bloomed into the full-blown BCS, Rosenthal, time after time, negotiated ND into a favored position. Wadsworth, strong in many areas, struggled in this one. He did not have the network of friends and former colleagues in college athletics, and the BCS conference commissioners exposed that. He also preferred strong-arming to schmoozing, when finesse really was what was required. White did have those qualities, the most underrated part of his tenure because he had the harshest landscape to deal with. As long as ND is a national player in football, the bowls and TV will insist the Irish have a prominent seat at the table. But it's not just the seat, it's the degree of difficulty for ND to land in a BCS bowl. It's also the financial trappings.

The next AD better know what he or she is doing at the BCS meetings. This is not an aspect of the job you can afford training wheels.

The NBC contract runs through the 2010 season, but had White stayed, negotiations would have heated up soon to extend the contract. This will be one of the first orders of business of the new AD. Exposure is every bit as important, if not more, than the price tag.

And the Big East? As powerful as it continues to be in basketball, it goes through cycles where football threatens to implode the conference. Commissioner Mike Tranghese has done an amazing job with duct tape, caulk and miracles. But what happens when he retires?

ND needs to have a league to house its basketball and Olympic sports teams. No Big East means a search for a new conference. And short of the unpalatable option of Conference USA, no other league is likely to take the Irish without football being part of the package. The new AD better have a good Plan B ready to go. With all that at stake, are you going to trust this to someone who has never run an athletic department? Are you going to trust it to someone with scant or no football administrative experience on their rȩsumȩ?

Keeping score

The only purported candidate who has gone to the trouble of issuing a press release that he is not interested is Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith. The former ND football player, former Irish assistant coach and former successor to White at Arizona State has reportedly endorsed SMU athletic director Steve Orsini.

The former Irish fullback's experience falls completely in line with what Notre Dame is looking for. He's even hired a former ND football coach (George O'Leary at Central Florida) and a former Irish basketball coach (Matt Doherty at SMU). He most recently raised eyebrows by prying football coach June Jones away from Hawaii.

Orsini has worked in the ND athletic department, worked for Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys. … but something possibly overlooked is his ability to deal with strong personalities. And Notre Dame has them in its coaching ranks, most visibly head football coach Charlie Weis and hockey coach Jeff Jackson.

Weis and Orsini do have a past, a positive past, as illustrated in this 2005 interview with the Tribune when Orsini was at Central Florida.

"He's a good friend," Orsini said of Weis. "He lived in my dorm, Flanner Hall, and after football was over and we finally had a life in the spring semester of our senior year we formed a softball team. Charlie was our third baseman, and we ended up winning the campus championship."

Weis was also player-coach for Flanner's interhall football team, and Orsini and some of the other Irish football players who lived in Flanner would try to catch every one of Weis' games that they could.

"You could just tell he was going to be a coach back then, and a real good one," Orsini said. "Most of the guys in Flanner would ask you questions like, 'What was it like to play Texas?' 'What was it like to play in Dallas?' Charlie would ask you, 'Why were you in Cover-2 on third-and-four.?'

"Charlie was all over it. Even back then, he was a student of the game. I knew he would be a coach and a very good one, but I never dreamed he'd be our coach, Notre Dame's coach. But I'm loving it. That's one of the great things about having been at Notre Dame, following your friends, watching them do well and knowing that you're still as close as you ever were."

Loose ends

White's departure means the 7-4-1 scheduling philosophy in football (seven home games, four road games, one off-site game per season) and its commitment to scheduling Big East teams could both take left turns under a new AD. But it may take some convincing.

Jenkins and the upper echelon of Notre Dame's leadership had to buy into the idea at some point. And until the new AD is hired, the rest of the staff will conduct business as usual per White's vision.

Time on ND's side

Notre Dame has a terrific interim athletic director in Missy Conboy and a staff extremely capable of carrying on day-to-day business. That's just one of many reasons that Jenkins should and will likely take his time.

There is a BCS meeting on June 17. However, the issues on the agenda are not considered substantive. The next pressing issue will be negotiating the new TV deal for the next BCS cycle, something that could begin as soon as the September meeting.

And the few points in history when ND hasn't had a permanent athletic director haven't exactly hurt the Irish - at least not in football. Different era, different set of encyclopedias, but … ND had no AD in 1918, 1919, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944 and 1946. Well, in those seasons the Irish were a combined 52-6-6 with two national titles.

So why not Flavor Flav?