Jack Swarbrick watched Clemson’s upset of Alabama at a distance.

The Notre Dame athletics director spent time in Tampa leading up to the game as part of the College Football Playoff management committee but flew back to the Midwest on Monday afternoon in time to watch that four-plus hour epic from home.

It touched a few nerves around South Bend.

While Clemson’s game-winning touchdown – a “pick” play to use quarterback Deshaun Watson’s words – triggered a flashback to the offensive pass interference call against C.J. Prosise at Florida State that wiped out Corey Robinson’s game-winning score, Swarbrick took little issue with the no-call.

What got Swarbrick’s attention were two targeting non-calls against Alabama in the first half, one a blow to Watson’s head that helped spin him around in the open field.

It was the kind of hit DeShone Kizer took against Virginia Tech twice without penalty. It was the kind of hit Torii Hunter Jr. took at Texas without penalty. It was also the kind of hit delivered by Devin Studstill against Syracuse and Nicco Fertitta at USC that resulted in ejections.

Swarbrick made his position on all that clear during his weekly in-house podcast.

When in doubt, call the penalty.

“It’s a complete mess,” Swarbrick said. “I think more than anything it exposes the challenges of not having a unified officiating system. I talk to (conference) commissioners all the time and they have different standards that are being applied.

“It is about player safety and it ought to just be blows to the head. There’s gotta be some measure of a blow to the head that results in a penalty.”

To set the bar for what he thinks should be targeting, Swarbrick went back four years to Notre Dame’s loss at Pittsburgh when Stephon Tuitt was ejected after a collision with quarterback Tom Savage. Tuitt made helmet-to-helmet contact on the play when Savage lowered his head as a runner outside the pocket.

Brian Kelly was livid at the call on the sidelines. Swarbrick saw the flag, dropped by an ACC officiating crew, as correct for the sake of player safety.



“That’s a consequence I think you have to live with,” Swarbrick said. “I think you’re trying to protect kids.

“There’s never been intention associated with (targeting) and you may get some really unfair results because the offensive player did move his head or something intervened, but my reaction is sort of I don’t care. First and foremost, we’re protecting players and if that helps you protect players, we ought to do it.”

What Swarbrick wants most relative to targeting is some consistency.

Basically, if Studstill and Fertitta are going to get ejected, the hits against Kizer and Hunter warrant the same consequence. Each involved helmet-to-helmet contact.

Swarbrick noted a unified training of targeting on a national level would help, although the targeting calls in question for Notre Dame this season were all made or missed by ACC crews. In the case of Fertitta, a Pac-12 replay official created the foul from the booth after the ACC crew didn’t throw the flag on the field.

“We can train them centrally and have them all apply the same standards,” he said. “In my judgment we just have a wrong-headed approach to defining this.”