“If tomorrow you told me, you just can’t do what you want to do in athletics and you’re going to have to shut it down, and we would have club sports, something like that — I don’t think it would significantly impact the revenue,” Father Jenkins says. Some alumni and donors might revolt, he acknowledges. “But just in terms of a financial proposition, I don’t think it would impact the academy.”
Hmmm.
“You made the ‘Hmmm’ there,” he says, detecting the doubt prompted by recollections of, say, Alabama-Birmingham trying to shut down its football program, only to have outraged supporters swiftly revive it. Isn’t talk of such a move at Notre Dame more a theoretical exercise than a practical consideration? An existential matter only, to be debated by scholars over a couple of Father Hesburgh Manhattans?
Father Jenkins’s tone faintly suggests: Try me. “Would someone who was going to give a gift to Notre Dame for a chair in philosophy or physics not give it if we did without football?” he asks. “I don’t think so.”