ND won’t change as long as the naive fans keep hoping and expecting a championship. There are literally hundreds of thousands of ND fans that actually think in any given year we will win it all. They don’t have a clue who we are recruiting. As long as they fill the stands, and spend millions on tickets and merch they don’t care. 8 to 12 wins a year keeps the fan base content that we are making progress and close. If most fans paid half as much attention as the people in this forum, the pressure on ND would be so overwhelming they’d have no choice but to change.
Then ND is going to learn the hard way that fans aren't going to stick around.
The fanbase is getting older and older, and the landscape, if left unchecked, is going to turn off many general CFB fans. If ND can't get over the hump, people will stop caring. ND was a top 10 team last year and they had embarrassing showings for their first few home games. The Toledo and Cincinnati games come to mind, where the ND fan turnout was putrid.
Reality is that ND doesn't seem to be nabbing the young fans like they used to, because much of what the younger fans know about ND is them getting walloped in the big games to Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State, etc.
And I think most ND fans are either aware or will soon find out about how things have turned in the CFB landscape regarding NIL. It's almost impossible to avoid the subject. So then when they try to figure out what ND is doing to fight this and the answer is fuck-all, the doubt will start to set in.
It will just be another hurdle that ND has to overcome, and eventually, you can only have so many hurdles. Not to mention, you have a first year head coach in a critical juncture of your program. How ND traverses these next few years will be absolutely crucial to the survivability of the program.
How long can ND continue to fall short against the best teams before it gets old? Not even just beating them, but looking remotely competitive against them. And now those same programs that were raking in top talent left and right will be even more difficult to beat out for said talent, because they're willing to put forth a lot more than ND is willing to with NIL.