At Notre Dame, Football Tradition Makes Room for Financial Reality

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SOUTH BEND, Ind. — In the beginning, there was Notre Dame Stadium, the House that Rockne Built, a concrete cathedral cradling a proud football program with seven national college football championships. Later, Touchdown Jesus appeared, watching over the Fighting Irish and their home field as Notre Dame went on to claim four more national titles.

And for decades, those few acres on campus were, at least in the eyes of Notre Dame fans, sacred ground.

But progress waits for no one, not even Notre Dame. In October, Garth Brooks performed a concert inside the House that Rockne Built, a first for the stadium. And next week, two N.H.L. teams will play an outdoor hockey game on a rink installed atop its famed field.

Just as Knute Rockne’s years as coach catapulted Notre Dame into the nation’s consciousness and the “Word of Life” mural — Touchdown Jesus’s formal name — offered the university a singular television backdrop, the Brooks concert and the hockey game have announced a new direction for an old-school athletic program.

Having completed a nine-figure makeover of the stadium and its surrounding environs, and facing a financial landscape in college football that threatens to leave the Fighting Irish behind, Notre Dame is now ready to leverage, very carefully, one of its most valuable assets: a mystique it has spent more than a century cultivating.

Brooks, the country music star, was the perfect match for the stadium’s debut as a prestige entertainment site. He has a wide following and a wholesome image, and he even claimed to have had a poster of the former Fighting Irish quarterback Joe Montana in his dorm room at Oklahoma State. This month, his concert was broadcast on network television on the same day that the Fighting Irish (12-0) earned a spot in the College Football Playoff. Notre Dame will face Clemson (13-0) in the first semifinal, at the Cotton Bowl on Saturday.

A few days later, on New Year’s Day, the N.H.L.’s annual open-air Winter Classic game will be held at Notre Dame Stadium. Coming soon, perhaps, will be a summer soccer match featuring two of Europe’s marquee clubs.

Will modernizing its athletic business plan help deliver a 12th national title? Not even Notre Dame can guarantee that. But a willingness to embrace a new financial strategy, university officials said, 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 — now standard for almost every major college football stadium — roughly two-thirds of the $400 million set aside for the university’s construction project was first spent on classrooms and facilities for the music, anthropology and psychology departments, as well as state-of-the-art student recreation and multimedia centers.

“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?” Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick said. “It’s an interesting balance, and what dictates our ability to do any of it depends on those cultural underpinnings.”

Swarbrick knows better than most how expensive it is to keep up with the Alabamas, the Oklahomas and the other universities in the so-called Power Five conferences, with their billion-dollar television contracts and — in the case of the Big Ten, the Southeastern Conference and the Pacific-12 — their own cash-generating television networks. In addition, most of the Power Five universities have significantly larger enrollments than Notre Dame has; that produces vast alumni bases that can earmark tens of millions of dollars in donations to their sports teams, widening an already sizable wealth gap in college sports.

There was a time when Notre Dame’s tradition produced structural advantages of its own. Notre Dame’s contract with NBC Sports to televise its home games used to be the envy of college football, allowing the university to remain an independent and free from the constraints of a conference schedule. But the reported $16 million annually it received looks quaint amid today’s economics.

Now, the football program is Notre Dame’s only sport that consistently makes money, but that revenue — a tiny part of an operating budget of more than $1.4 billion — goes to a general fund that nonathletic officials allocate.

Embracing the financial realities of modern college football — multimillion-dollar salaries for assistant coaches, luxury suites for top donors and corporate sponsorships to pay for it all — 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.