The introduction of non-football events at Notre Dame Stadium -- like a recent Garth Brooks concert and next week's NHL Winter Classic -- has "announced a new direction for an old-school athletic program," as the school is now "ready to leverage, very carefully, one of its most valuable assets: a mystique it has spent more than a century cultivating," according to Joe Drape of the N.Y. TIMES. The new strategy comes after completing a "nine-figure makeover of the stadium and its surrounding environs" in '17, and amid "facing a financial landscape in college football that threatens to leave the Fighting Irish behind." School officials said that a willingness to embrace a new financial strategy is "vital in helping Notre Dame keep up in the increasingly rich world of college athletics." The retrofitting of Notre Dame Stadium was "just the first step." After years of "pushback from tradition-loving alumni, the stadium now has new premium seating, event spaces and even a five-story video board." To get those amenities, "roughly two-thirds" of the $400M set aside for the university’s construction project was "first spent on classrooms and facilities for the music, anthropology and psychology departments." Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick said, “Everything we do here is threading that needle of: How can athletics do what it needs to do to compete, but also serve the broader community? It’s an interesting balance, and what dictates our ability to do any of it depends on those cultural underpinnings.” Drape notes embracing the "financial realities of modern college football" has been "part of Notre Dame’s fiscal awakening." But it is also at the "heart of its new push to monetize one of America’s most iconic brands in ways that once might have been unthinkable" (NYTIMES.com, 12/28).
