SOUTH BEND, Ind. — The True Believer lives, appropriately enough, on Notre Dame Avenue. His house is just a few blocks from the campus that lured him back 10 years ago, more than three decades after he graduated with a degree in economics. On a coffee table in the living room of the house there is a book about faith and a book about the 1964 Fighting Irish football season.

On mild nights, the True Believer will sit on his back deck with a tumbler of WhistlePig rye whiskey, play some country music and contemplate how to make the improbable happen at his alma mater.

There are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who look at Notre Dame’s golden dome and see a shiny roof, who look at Touchdown Jesus and see a mural; and the ones who look at those campus icons and feel a stirring inside, a calling to be part of a transformational college experience.

Jack Swarbrick, True Believer in the Notre Dame ideal, falls in the latter group. In fact, he may be the leader of the latter group.

“I think this place has a uniqueness about it that is very hard for people to understand,” the 63-year-old told Yahoo Sports last month. “You’ve got to revel in the distinctiveness of it. You’ve got to embrace it.”

Swarbrick is the athletic director at a place that keeps chasing what at times seems like a conflicting set of grand objectives:

To be a world leader in Catholic-based education.

To be one of the elite academic institutions in America.

To win at the highest level athletically – most prominently (and elusively) in football.

“The only leg of the stool open for questioning right now is athletics,” Swarbrick said. “I’ve got to find a way, because the faith and academics are in great shape.”

Fact is, most of Swarbrick’s department is in great shape, as well. The Irish were 23rd nationally in the Learfield Cup standings for 2016-17, which measures overall athletic performance, and have been as high as third in recent years. They’ve had national champions and championship contenders in several sports. Graduation rates and Academic Progress Rates for athletes remain resolutely high.

View photos Jack Swarbrick is at the center of trying to put Notre Dame football back in the national championship conversation. (AP) More

But football is the sport of myth and legend at Notre Dame, and its performance has lagged far behind its historical station for much of the last quarter century. It has come perilously close to rock bottom within the last year, going 4-8 in 2016 and being ordered by the NCAA to vacate victories from 2012 and ’13 due to Committee on Infractions findings of academic fraud.

Head coach Brian Kelly’s seventh season at the school was a complete bust, prompting major offseason staff changes and significant introspection. This season has started auspiciously, with a dominant opening victory over Temple, but the true measure of the Irish will begin to be taken Saturday night when Georgia comes to town.

The negative headlines of 2016, on and off the field, have intensified the suspicion that you simply cannot have it all at Notre Dame. That the school is a football anachronism, trying to thrive on an outdated model, fooling itself into thinking its three-legged stool can stand next to the one-pillar programs at Alabama and Ohio State and Clemson and Florida State and so on.

Jack Swarbrick, True Believer, is having none of that. The combination of books on his coffee table is not accidental. He’s a believer in a harmonic convergence of faith and football at Notre Dame, and has put his faith in football succeeding at Notre Dame.

“Certainly, a lot of institutions have high academic standards and a high degree of athletic success – Stanford, Duke, Northwestern,” Swarbrick said. “It’s not a question of ‘if’ you can do that. It’s harder, and you’ve got to stay true to your model. But no one’s really ever pulled off being an elite academic institution, highly ranked in athletics and having a fully integrated faith.”

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