Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick bemoans 'trend' of coaches leaving before season's end

College football has been dealt a royal flush of chaos in the past several days, with two head coaches — Notre Dame’s Brian Kelly and Oklahoma’s Lincoln Riley — ditching their respective bowl-bound programs mid-season to accept higher-paying jobs at LSU and USC, respectively.

The first move, Riley’s hiring, was a seismic spin of the coaching carousel, creating another vacancy at Oklahoma, bringing Bob Stoops out of retirement and marked “one of the biggest moves in the history of the game” which “changed the landscape of college football.” At least, that’s what USC athletic director Mike Bohn labeled it, after he flew Riley to the west coast and left a 10-2 Oklahoma team looking for new coaches.

Unbeknownst to Bohn, even if his move truly was one of the biggest in history, such was the case for a mere 24 hours. Because one day later, LSU plucked Kelly off Notre Dame, making Kelly the first Notre Dame head coach to leave the post, by means other than firing or retirement, for another job since 1907. Both hirings ended up leaving premier college football programs without coaches, but the argument for Kelly’s being worse seems clear — after all, Notre Dame is far from out of the College Football Playoff picture. That trend of abandoning ship mid-season, especially when things are going well, is one that needs to end, according to Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick.

“It’s hard to generalize because every circumstance is a little different, but I hope it doesn’t become too much of a trend,” Swarbrick said of the coaches’ hiring process in a Tuesday press conference. “I think the experience for the student-athletes is generally better when they have continuity through their season.”

Swarbrick then went on to argue that 12 years in one job as a coach is a “long time,” and he even framed this as a not-so-surprising move. After all, he claims, “there had been enough in the weeks leading up that gave me a pretty strong sense that there might be other things that were attracting Brian.”

Maybe Swarbrick wasn’t lying, and maybe he wasn’t totally blindsided by the coach’s decision to leave. That would make him the only one of millions of fans and media that simply couldn’t believe the move. Or maybe he was as shocked as the rest, and he merely created the perception that the future of a extraordinarily storied college football program — which lies completely, entirely on his hands, without a close second-place candidate — is under control.

Regardless, though, his point stands. With regular-season play having reached an end, all that’s left is conference championships and bowl games. Of course, independent Notre Dame won’t participate in the former. But the Irish, which finished the regular season 11-1, came in at No. 6 in last week’s College Football Playoff rankings. One of the schools it trailed, Ohio State, will drop out of the top six after a loss to Michigan, and the the coach-less Fighting Irish figure to come in this week at No. 5 or 6.

Translation: Notre Dame is in the hunt for a national title. And now, thanks to the carousel moving at light speed, it might have to make a run for its first national championship trophy since 1988 without a head coach.