Notre Dame Refuses To Pay Buyout To Hire Andy Ludwig
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According to ESPN's Pete Thamel, Utah offensive coordinator Andy Ludwig will be staying in Salt Lake City after Notre Dame refused to meet the buyout demands on his contract.
This is a crushing play for Notre Dame's football program, who had zeroed in on Ludwig after losing Tommy Rees to Alabama. Ludwig interviewed on campus over the weekend and he immediately became the top target for the open offensive coordinator position.
Notre Dame refusing to pay Ludwig's buyout is an incredibly bad look for the higher ups. It is one thing to refuse to get into the pay-for-play NIL recruiting landscape, that's an understandable take for a program like Notre Dame. But not being willing to pay for a buyout for a coach that your head coach has identified as the best guy to lead your offense is unacceptable.
Forcing the staff to "settle" on a candidate it clearly didn't view as the best option not only hurts the program, it's a blow to the players the university that says it's all about making sure the players are taken care of. There should be no reason for Notre Dame not to be willing to pay whatever buyout necessary to get a coach of Ludwig's caliber, and proven ability as a coordinator and teacher.
Whoever Notre Dame does bring in will be viewed as a coach that head coach Marcus Freeman had to turn to after missing out on his top candidate, simply because the leadership of the athletic department was unwilling to pony up the money to make this kind of big move.
Make no mistake, landing Andy Ludwig would have been a home run for Freeman and the football program. He has a proven track record of developing quarterbacks and putting outstanding offenses on the field, usually without talent like what he would have inherited at Notre Dame.
It feeds into the stigma that Notre Dame is unwilling to truly do what it takes to win. You can stand on a moral high ground when it comes to NIL or altering your academic standards, and those are righteous causes. But refusing to make sure Notre Dame's coaching staff is filled with the best of the best, simply because a school with the resources that Notre Dame has doesn't want to fork over the dollars is the ultimate reason the "leadership" at Notre Dame is the ultimate stumbling block for the football team to truly compete for a championship.
It tells me the leadership in the athletic department, and the higher ups at the school, simply give lip service to wanting to be champions and when they talk about doing right by the student-athletes. They aren't willing to put their money where their mouths are.
It's quite the message the "leadership" at Notre Dame is sending to their head coach.
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