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.