Weekend notes: Buyouts, schedules, and more

It was only a matter of time before somebody did a public search of Notre Dame’s tax records and found out just how much Charlie Weis actually got paid to walk away from Notre Dame with six years left on his ten-year contract extension.

Brian Hamilton of the Chicago Tribune was the first to do the digging, and the number he uncovered was certainly a big one -- with Weis getting paid $6,638,403 as a “termination payment,” after Weis was relieved from his duties after the 2009 football season.

The official wording on Notre Dame’s Form 990 tax return:

“Termination payment of $6,638,403 was made during the reporting period to Charles J. Weis under a separation agreement that includes much smaller annual payments through December, 2015.”

The dollar amount made waves across the internet today with main-stream media members and anonymous message-board posters alike taking some type of pleasure in an odd sort of gallows humor, as if Weis was somehow better off getting the severance payment than the six-years left on his deal. A deal that for the longest time was just assumed to be guaranteed, with numbers like $18-$20 million being thrown around by major media outlets as the cost of firing Weis back when he was on the Irish hot seat.

No doubt, the seven-figure check the Irish cut to Weis certainly hurt the bottom line (and supposedly isn’t completely over), but that’s the price of doing business with high-level executives, which is certainly something that the head coach of Notre Dame can qualify as.

If you have any sort of animosity, direct it at former athletic director Kevin White, who negotiated an unprecedented extension midway through the debut season of a first-year head coach.
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If you’re looking for required reading, head over to the Notre Dame student newspaper, where Douglas Farmer, the Editor-in-Chief of the Observer, got an exclusive sit-down interview with athletic director Jack Swarbrick.

Swarbrick was incredibly candid about a ton of hot-button issues, including a revamped -- and much more difficult -- football schedule, the potential for a Notre Dame Network, the conference realignment that almost swallowed the Irish, and the demands on his time.

Here’s the greatest hits if you’re too lazy to click over and read:

On toughening the football schedule:

If you’re going to be independent, if you’re going to give yourself the flexibility of building your own schedule, you have to embrace that. You have to try and build one that’s really good. I also think that if one assumes that the current BCS format remains in its current form or something like it, it’s really incumbent on Notre Dame to be able to make the case at the end of the year that it’s played the toughest schedule in the country, because there will be a strong presumption in favor of the SEC champ, the Big Ten champ, the Pac-12 champ, or the Big 12 champ to be in that championship game. If we want to be there, we better be able to make the argument that no one in the country played a tougher schedule, and so that’s how we’re going to build them.

On the potential for a Notre Dame Network:

We are very focused on building our digital media capacity. It’ll probably take a slightly different form because we work with a different set of assets than Texas. I think that Texas’ model is a great one; I think they’ll be hugely successful. But it is based on the remarkable passion for that school in a geographic area, so it fits over a cable footprint. I don’t have any market like that. I have interest everywhere, but not a concentration of it in one place. And so our opportunities will really come as broadband delivery increases and as you all are consuming media on a more content-by-content basis rather than a network basis. So as those two things evolve, that’s really going to play to Notre Dame’s favor, and what we want to do is position ourselves to take full advantage of it. So as broadband delivery on an a la carte basis, if you will, becomes the future of media, Notre Dame’s going to be really well-positioned.

On the conference realignment that reshaped the Big Ten, Pac-10, and Big 12:

I was consumed by it. I spent all my time it. The staff understood -- it’s like the football search. When you make a change in football coach, you get with your senior staff and you say, ‘I’m out of here for a while. I have to put all my energy on this.’ Conference expansion was a lot like that. We had to stay very engaged. We had to make sure we understood what was going on, we had to conduct an internal evaluation to reaffirm our priorities, and so we worked on that every day.

This is incredibly interesting stuff and a great job by Farmer and the Observer. If there’s something that doesn’t surprise me, but confirms a lot of what I heard when it was happening, it’s that Swarbrick was one of the leading voices during Jim Delany’s potential Big Ten power-play, which very nearly changed the face of college football as we know it. Some people discounted Swarbrick’s role in all of this, but it’s pretty clear from his comments that he was far more involved than many people realized.
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It’s that time of year again... Yep, it’s “Watch List” season, and Braxston Cave is the first of (potentially) many Irish names to find themselves on one.

The 42-man list (which is listed in its entirety here) includes only David Molk from the Irish’s upcoming schedule. It’s a good honor for Cave, who was singled out repeatedly by head coach Brian Kelly for his improvements throughout the season and spring practice.
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Lastly, a special bit of congratulations to all the seniors at Notre Dame celebrating their graduation. It feels like yesterday (or maybe, the day before yesterday) when I was complaining about the cheesy license plate holder gift, trying to talk my parents into skipping my Business ceremony, and feeling really hung-over after a long week of partying. It’s a great celebration for families and students, the culmination of four great years in South Bend.

Now let me beat your parents to it: Go get a job...