There's been a lot of talk on this thread about whether or not Notre Dame should handle players differently or treat them like all other students, but I think that like anything else, the right answer's somewhere in the middle. I'm all for treating student athletes like other students when it comes to same dorms, holding them responsible for infractions, etc., but in this case, their process should be handled differently because it already inherently is different. Being held out of games and scrutinized publicly puts them in a very unique position that normal students going through this process never face. I would hope the University would speed up the process for the players in this situation just as much as I would hope they wouldn't string along a regular student who's being unusually inconvenienced -- like someone who can't finish a post-grad application or apply for a job until their results come back.
All that being said, however, it seems like speeding things up might not be as easy as we'd like to think. As some people have stated, you would think you could make some phone calls and pull some strings to get everybody to find a reasonable and earlier time to meet, but as others have pointed out, it's not necessarily something that's important enough to the proper people to make them go out of their way to do that. I understand the speculation that some in the administration might resent the football program for whatever reason, but this case might be a simple instance of the people in control not caring about football as much as 24/7 message board lurking fans like myself.
