Hi, I'm Jeff Rea your host for Economic Outlook.

Thank you for joining us each week as we discuss the region's most important economic development initiatives with a panel of experts.

Recently, I had a chance to sit down with Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua for a conversation on the business of sports, his vision for Notre Dame athletics, the future of collegiate sports and the evolving landscape of media rights and student athlete opportunities.

Last spring, Pete Bevacqua was named the new university vice president.

And James E. Rohr director of athletics at the University of Notre Dame.

Pete played a key role in extending Notre Dame's NBC partnership and securing a new College Football Playoff TV deal with ESPN.

He previously served as chairman of NBC sports, overseeing major events like Olympics, Major League Baseball, and Notre Dame football.

College sports is big business, and the University of Notre Dame is right in the middle of helping the NCAA navigate this rapidly changing environment of college athletics.

We hope you enjoyed my conversation with Pete Bevacqua.

Pete.

Thank you first for being with us today.

We're grateful for you being here.

We've got a an important group of community leaders here who wanted a chance to get to know you a little bit better.

One thing for your benefit.

We were.

We were telling Pete that, you know, in the past, we've had, coach Marcus Freeman has joined us, for this event.

Jack Swarbrick, Pete's predecessor, has also participated in this event.

It turns out Pete's actually a bigger draw that both of us, as we have a bigger crowd today, than we have for each of those.

And so, Pete, we're grateful.

And we hope that you remind the coach and Jack when you see them that, that what a big what a big, important draw you.

I'm actually going from this to a meeting with, with Coach Freeman, so I'll be sure to tell him.

Wonderful.

I appreciate it's about double the size of the crowd here, I think.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we only had a few tables up front here.

When he was here, it looked like.

No, no, obviously we're very grateful for him as well too.

So.

So I want to start with, just getting to know you a little bit better, you know?

You know, we've seen your bio.

We've heard a little bit of the introduction, but.

But always think it's better to hear straight from the from you.

So, you know, so, you know, take us back to, Pete Bevacqua, the student at Notre Dame many years ago, the English major, thinking about what he wanted to do when he grew up.

So give us a little bit of your history.

So to to play off your initial comment, keep a fork with a student had a lot more hair.

But I grew up outside in New York City.

Came from a diehard Notre Dame family.

I have four older sisters.

My father was a 1955 grad.

My oldest sister went to Saint Mary's.

Two of my sisters went to Notre Dame.

So I was one of these kids who was absolutely brainwashed.

I literally don't have a memory in my life that didn't involve Notre Dame.

And my father and I, when I played a lot of sports growing up.

And when I was a kid in the summer, we would hop in the car and drive from New York out here in August to watch the football team practice.

That was like our summer vacation, and I would wait till after practice and I had like a bag of Twinkies and Devil Dogs and Hostess Cupcakes, and I would give them to the players as they left practice, which now would be a total no no with all the sports, sports nutrition.

But you know, with so when when it came time for me to apply to school, I Notre Dame was the only place I applied to.

I didn't even think for a half a second about applying anywhere else.

I luckily got in and just loved love.

Notre Dame, was an English major, kind of concocted at the time, a bit of a film minor and just had an absolute blast.

Wouldn't trade those four years for anything.

And when I graduated, I truly had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

And I had it kind of somewhat narrowed down to either going to law school or film school, which are two pretty different things.

And I went back to the New York Connecticut area where I had gone to school and taught for a year, and I taught eighth grade.

I taught sixth grade algebra, eighth grade English, 11th grade English.

I coached the eighth grade football team, the eighth grade basketball team, and the golf team.

And I kind of used that year to figure out between law school and film school.

And I like to say I probably had the only two parents in the country that were aggressively pushing me to film school, but I chickened out and I ended up going to law school.

I went to Georgetown, and not because I had a burning desire to be a lawyer, but I loved being a student and enjoyed law school and went to work at a firm in New York City, Davis, Polk and Wardwell, doing corporate law.

And my.

But my heart was always with sports.

And my father, who passed away at far too young age.

Right as I got to work at the law firm in 1997, he would always say, hey, if you can figure out a way to make a living at something you're passionate about, life's a lot more enjoyable.

And so those words were always ringing in my ears.

And I was at Davis Polk for four years, and I applied for a job as in-house counsel at the United States Golf Association, played a ton of golf growing up, was always a caddy.

That was always my summer job from fifth grade through my first year of law school.

Caddy, caddy, master, kind of the kid who ran the golf shop.

And I luckily got that job at the USGA, and it just turned my life around.

All of a sudden I went from kind of going to work with a bit of a pit in my stomach to just like, springing out of bed and just enjoyed it so much.

And I was at the USGA for 11 years as in-house counsel, and I ran the U.S. open for about seven years and then oversaw the business side of the USGA.

I left there and went to creative artist agency CAA for a little bit of time, and then got recruited by the PGA of America to to be their CEO and moved the family to Florida and really had the time of our lives professionally and personally.

For those of you who don't follow golf, the PGA of America represents the 30,000 golf professionals in this country, runs events like the PGA Championship and the Ryder Cup.

And I was there about seven years and loved it, but it was getting a little bit routine.

And that's when the NBC opportunity opened up to to go run NBC sports.

And for me, it was the ability to go to, this kind of iconic American brand in a moment of unbelievable transition.

As that whole industry was moving from a broadcast cable approach to a broadcast streaming approach with the advent of things like Amazon and YouTube and Netf And loved it.

And I could have seen myself at NBC for the rest of my career, but got a call one day from Father John, who I had gotten to know over the years saying, hey, would you?

When it becomes available, which we think will be a few years from now, would you be interested in being the athletic director at Notre Dame?

You know, and I'd like to say I went home and got out a legal pad and the pros and the cons, but I immediately said, Father John, that would that would be a dream come true.

Then I had to go talk to my wife and family.

Obviously there was a little bit of a different conversation, but, but it was just the ability.

I mean, I can honestly say, with the exception of my family, nothing has meant more to me in my life than Notre Dame and the ability to come back to Notre Dame in this role at this time of such unprecedented change and movement in the college sports landscape, where the whether it's the Nil or transfer portal conference realignment, and now the series of antitrust suits levied against the NCAA with the House settlement.

For those of you who follow sports, that's right on the horizon.

But the ability to come back to Notre Dame, to have a hand in helping navigate us through this and to preserve what is our North Star in the athletic department, which is the student athlete experience.

And in the modern landscape of college sports, that's harder than ever.

It's harder to maintain than it was when I was at Notre Dame, than it was when my father was at Notre Dame or my sisters.

But I also think it's more important than ever, and is going to be more of a differentiator for Notre Dame than it's ever been.

Great.

I want to dive into your current role a little bit and we'll talk about, you know, kind of what's happening in the landscape.

But, a group of business leaders here, they're working to attract top talent, and they're working to build culture.

They're working to attract customers.

A lot of the things that you also have to do in your role, give us kind of the, I will call it the nuts and bolts, a little bit of athletic department, you know, the the number of employees, budget, number of sports, number of athletes.

Yeah.

Let's just give us a feel of size.

So we have, you know, we have over close to depending on the 300 or so staff members, we have 26 programs, 13 men's programs, 13 women women's programs, obviously coaches and coaching staff.

That comes with all of that.

We have 739 student athletes on campus.

We obviously have an alumni database of thousands of student athletes.

And what's interesting about college sports and depending on how you look at it, but certainly change college sports dramatically, is that the business of college sports is bigger than it's ever been, and it's really driven by college football.

I mean men's and women's college basketball.

They're both tremendous drivers.

They're both huge sports.

I think nothing is more popular right now or has a greater trajectory than than women's basketball.

The college level is probably followed somewhat closely by by volleyball.

And, you know, that goes without saying.

What could it be more excited about in the lives of the team we have this year?

We have a great game tonight.

But college football has become such big business.

And going back to my NBC days, it is absolutely what's driving conference realignment.

It's what's driving the Nil market.

I think it's primarily in concert with basketball on the men's and women's side, but again, primarily college football driving the nil market.

So you have to be cognizant of that.

And Notre Dame, to its credit, was an early proponent, you know, Father John and Jack, my predecessor of fair compensation for student athletes, because the business has just gotten so big and it's difficult to be a student at Notre Dame.

It's incredibly difficult to be a student athlete because you have all of the obligations of a student.

And layer on top of that.

You bet you have a full time job and you have a a social media platform and a and, an emergence as an athlete.

That is just it doesn't end.

It's 24/7.

So we ask a tremendous amount from these student athletes.

So, you know, in a nutshell, people say, well, what's your what's your day to day look like?

What are you what are your key priorities.

And you could talk about maximizing the media deals, maximizing revenue, interacting obviously with the other aspects of the campus.

But I go back to that.

It's the preservation of that authentic, legitimate student athlete experience in this modern landscape.

And how do you you know what I what I always say to father Bob, our president, is that the key to the Notre Dame athletics is you have to maintain that legitimate student athlete experience, and you have to be able to go out there and beat Georgia and Penn State or UConn and women's basketball.

It's for Notre Dame.

It can't be the goals.

It's not one or the other.

We don't want to just create a great student athlete experience and not be able to compete at the highest level, nor do we want to do everything we can to compete at the highest level and win ACC championships and national championships at the expense of that authentic student athlete experience.

So I would say my main obligation, despite the size of the business, which is large and growing, is to maintain and preserve, serve that student athlete experience and not through some kind of Pollyanna prism of what he used to look like.

But through this modern lens of what it means to be progressive, strategic, ultra competitive, and yet make sure that our young men and women that come to Notre Dame and play a sport, leave with a Notre Dame degree.

When you mentioned college football, obviously we're coming off a tremendous college football season.

Our community benefited from, from a playoff opportunity.

So just speak to, this this season in this new format, the, you know, kind of what it's meant to maybe college football as a whole, but also the university in the local community.

Yeah.

I mean, it's it's no, it's no secret.

I think the, the Notre Dame football has been such a huge part of Notre Dame.

It's part of the DNA of Notre Dame.

You know, I like to say part of our strategic plan now is to become more and more of a global Catholic university.

And when you think about it, Notre Dame, one of the things, one of the many things that made Notre Dame a truly national university was Newt Rockne hopping on a train 100 years ago and going to bat to the west Coast to play USC.

So sports is the great front porch to Notre Dame and Notre Dame football.

When Notre Dame football is doing well, just everything's better on campus.

You know, it's just like it's sunnier and in the community.

Yeah, the food tastes better and my job's a hell of a lot easier.

But this season, you know, it is was remarkable.

And I'm not just saying this, but, you know, we are so fortunate to have Marcus Freeman as our coach.

I mean, he is just all worlds.

He he you know, what you see is who he is, the love the kids have for him, the student athletes.

And he's not just another Dame football coach.

She's become such a part of the campus, such a part of the community.

I mean, you, you're if you're at a women's basketball game, you look across the court and there he is with one of his kids.

If you're at a soccer game, a lacrosse game, a hockey game, he's part of the fabric of Notre Dame.

So we have the best coach in the country for Notre Dame because he accepts who we are.

He doesn't see all of the elements that some other football coaches would perceive as hurdles to success, as that he sees them as advantages, he sees them as differentiators.

He has an unbelievable staff around him.

We have two of the there's three facilities that you get judged by in football your stadium, your indoor practice facility and your football operations facility.

We have one of the best stadiums in the country in Notre Dame Stadium.

We have the best indoor practice facility.

And with this, if you go by campus, you come on campus.

You'll see the construction of the Shields Family Hall, which is our state of the art football facility.

So we're going to have three of the very best football facilities.

We have our own broadcast deal with NBC.

We have all the protections and revenue we need between the NBC deal and the College Football Playoff agreement that we have, and we can stay and feel more bullish than ever about it being independent because of the expansion of the college football playoffs from four teams to 12 teams as an independent football and a four team playoff scenario, you basically have to go undefeated.

Maybe you could lose a game.

You can't lose to NIU.

So if we had been a 14 playoff and we lose that game, we're not getting into the playoffs.

But now with the 12 team expansion.

Yeah, Marcus, our team wants to win every game.

But you know that's not always going to happen.

But we're going to keep knocking on that national championship door more than ever.

Are you going to play in the national championship game every year.

You know of course not.

But we're going to keep knocking on the door, keep knocking on the door, and we have all the pieces in place.

So I couldn't feel better about where we are as a football program.

This year was not a one off.

This is the new norm.

Again, not always going to the national championship game, but always hovering around it.

And you know that of all my memories of Notre Dame and I have a ton of them, nothing is more spectacular or nothing will be more memorable, memorable to me than that playoff game in December.

The way the community, the city rallied around that, the campus, the student body, you know, having the snow fall the night before just it was magical.

And it was different, right?

I mean, we had a ton of comments with our team and with the rest of the university.

Like, this is an imposition on South Bend.

It's a great thing.

It's a great economic boom.

But it's one thing to have a big game and have, you know, 80 to 100,000 people show up on a Saturday.

It's another thing a night, you know, on a Friday afternoon.

And the support we got from this community and it was just it was just amazing.

And I was just at a CFP meeting in Dallas on Tuesday, and we saw the comparisons of the host games in terms of student attendance, in terms of, how quickly the game sold out, the ticket prices on the secondary market and this game in South Bend, it blew out of the water those other three games.

And that's something I think everybody in this room participated in and should really be proud of.

It was a lot of fun.

And then we won.

Yeah we did.

But it's it's that again that helps.

Everybody's happy.

And me, although I'm sure there's a lot of IU grads in here.

Yes.

Not everybody is Notre Dame but most of them, most of them are.

So, so, talked to, you know, a lot of folks here that, you participated all year long and just different, you know, what do you need most from the community?

How can the community best support, what the university is doing and the athletics?

Yeah, I think I think I think it's a two way street.

I mean, it's what Notre Dame needs from the community.

It's what community the community needs from Notre Dame.

And, you know, having graduated here in 1993 and coming back because my sister and my brother in law have lived in South Bend since the late 80s, he's a professor on campus.

She's a kindergarten teacher on campus.

So I've always been a part.

I always come back at least once or twice.

I mean, I had I was looking forward to raising my family here and coming back to this community.

I think South Bend and you people in this room know better than I do, but I think there's so much momentum right now in this city.

I think that's great for South Bend.

I think selfishly, it's great for my family, but I think it's also really great for Notre Dame because the two are tied in terms of, you know, the one helps the other.

And that's always been the case.

And if you look at the Notre Dame strategic plan and where Notre Dame wants to go in the future, you know, part of it is building a better than ever relationship with the city and the surrounding area, because it just makes all the sense in the world.

You know, Notre Dame is a better university when South Bend is doing well.

And, you know, Notre Dame can help South Bend and South Bank and help Notre Dame.

And when we're recruiting, staff members are, I guess, hired, you know, quite a number of coaches that have, you know, high level coaches in football and other sports and, you know, being able to look them in the eye and look their spouses in the eye and say, hey, you know, read the articles about one of the 25 best places in the country to live.

You know, read the articles about the schools, read the articles about the major corporations moving into this area, and kind of this symbiotic relationship between the university and the city.

I don't think it's ever been stronger.

And, you know, that's a great thing.

I think Notre Dame right now, reputationally academically, is at an all time high.

And I think, you know, South Bend is is going in an unbelievably strong direction.

So from a Notre Dame perspective, we're just better when South Bend is doing well.

Great.

Thanks for sharing that.

We're glad you're back in town here.

So so as we get near the end it and not to spring it on you at the end, but that you mentioned, you know, that the, the landscape's changing in college athletics and you, you know, and things like nil and transfer portal and all those things have, not upset, but change what we thought was the norm in college athletics.

It's just been a few minutes looking into your crystal ball and talking to us about, you know, kind of the, the future of, of college athletics, what we have on the horizon right now.

And I'll kind of give you the, the simplified version of it, is this how settlement.

And there's, you know, there's been a series of antitrust cases against the NCAA.

And the NCAA is just losers, about every single one of them.

So now this is a very heavily negotiated settlement picked among the for power for conferences.

So think SEC, Big Ten, ACC big 12 and the NCAA Notre Dame, for the purposes of this settlement, part of the ACC.

You know, we're part of the ACC and all of our sports except football where we're independent and hockey, we're we're part of the Big Ten.

So that's the defendants.

And the plaintiffs side is basically two lawyers who are representing a class of student athletes.

That numbers around 270,000.

That settlement has been preliminarily approved, and the date of the hearing is April 7th, or the district court judge, Judge Wilkin, will issue her, declaration on the settlement and that everybody believes the settlement is going to be approved either on the April 7th or soon thereafter.

The key element of that settlement, and in terms of a going forward process, it will allow for the first time for universities to be able to directly compensate their student athletes.

If you're a member of the A4 conferences or if you opt in to the settlement and most major universities will opt into the settlement.

So right now, name, image and likeness compensation is out there.

Student athletes are doing deals through collective doing deals independently, and these collectives are raising money in a very kind of unregulated way.

The hope and the expectation is it's a move of the compensation from the unregulated world of the collectives into the university model and what that means for universities like Notre Dame is you're able to compensate your student athletes up to a cap amount, a defined cap amount.

That's the same for anybody.

You don't have to do it.

You can do it from a dollar.

But the cap will start at $20.5 million, and it'll have a 4% annual escalator.

And there'll be look in period.

So that number will go from 20.5 to over 21 to 24 and keep going.

That is a new economic burden for universities.

But that's something that, you know, the Notre Dame athletic department were were charged with being self-sustained.

So we're relying on you have contributions from our donors.

Our supporters were relying on being more cost conscious and economically responsible than ever.

But it will mean that Notre Dame and other major universities, starting next year, if this settlement is approved, will be compensating student athletes and the student athletes that will primarily receive the lion's share of the cap money are going to be those key revenue sports, predominantly football and then men's and women's basketball.

So we have to deal with the psychology of that, which I think is fine.

And we've been planning for it for a year.

And I think men's and women's basketball and football will be stronger at Notre Dame than ever.

But we also have to preserve all those other sports, all of those 23 other programs, those men's and women's sports, those Olympic sports, not just here but around the country.

My fear with this is that some universities that aren't as well situated as Notre Dame might start thinking about less funding, cutting sports and seeing men's programs primarily and to a lesser extent, women's programs suffer because of this new economic burden.

So those are all of the elements that not just Notre Dame, but everybody in college sports are dealing with right now.

But ultimately, I think if the House settlement is approved, it's a good thing for college sports.

We're going to need the help of Congress.

But bringing they'll still be collectives, but they'll be regulated.

And bringing this obligation into the universities where it will be more transparent, less exploitation of the student athletes, making sure universities fulfill the promises of scholarships, making sure health and medical insurance is provided beyond their playing career.

I think those are all good things that bode well for the future of college sports.

We're glad you're at the helm.

Figuring out some of this in our last 60s.

My my sources are telling me that, there could be, some breaking news on campus this afternoon.

Any secrets you want to share or, for, for our crowd who's promised not to go to social media?

Yeah, but no, I know everybody.

I know nobody will go on social for me.

You don't have to give us all the details.

I would say, first of all, it's good news.

It's nothing.

Bad news.

You know, I think it's going to be an event that will have on campus this spring, that the community will really enjoy, a professional event, a women's professional event.

And before I say too much and totally.

That's why.

But I, I think it's going to be exciting.

I think we're really excited about it as a university, as an athletic department.

And like you always do, I think, I think the community will support it.

Great.

He's Pete Bevacqua, he is the director of athletics and the university vice president.

He's been very gracious with their time.

Our community is very lucky to have him here.

Pete, thanks so much for that.

Many thanks.

That's it for our show today.

Thank you for watching or listening to our podcast.

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I'm Jeff.

Rea.

I'll see you next time.

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Thank you.