Article from 2011 (it has "softened" even more, imo):
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — For better or worse, Notre Dame has decided to play college football.
It means the school is recruiting and signing some players whose academic credentials wouldn’t have allowed them to step foot on campus in the past.
In at least one case, it means the Irish are being more lenient about disciplinary matters.
It ultimately means they have a chance to do what they haven’t done in a long time: win consistently, compete regularly for a BCS bowl and, perhaps, sniff a national championship every so often.
Did they sell their souls? No, they decided to play the game. Is Notre Dame reduced a bit as an institution of higher learning? It is if you hold to the idea the school is supposed to be above this sort of thing.
But if you think the Irish have been living in a fog of nostalgia for years, you ask: What took them so long? The good fathers at Notre Dame finally have come to their senses. They’ve decided to play ball.
Accepting football players with lower test scores doesn’t make Notre Dame any less of an academic institution; it makes Notre Dame like a lot of other good schools that want to have good football programs. The Irish finally have realized the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
Notre Dame hasn’t turned into Oklahoma or Alabama.
‘‘I’ve never had a policy conversation where the president, myself, admissions, we all sat down and said: ‘Coach, we’re going to open up the vault for you. Whatever you need, you got,’ ’’ coach Brian Kelly said Friday. ‘‘What they’ve said is: ‘Here is who we are at Notre Dame. Here [are] our expectations of you, relative to the young men you bring into this university. One, they better graduate. Two, they better represent us in a positive way.’
‘‘And other than that conversation, that’s how we’ve gone about recruiting to the University of Notre Dame.’’
Floyd a good example
The Irish might not be Oklahoma, but they aren’t Northwestern, either. Wildcats coach Pat Fitzgerald might have national-title aspirations, but he won’t realize them with the school’s strict recruiting limitations. And there’s nothing wrong with being a winning program from year to year with an outside chance of getting a BCS bowl bid once in a while.
But that’s not acceptable at Notre Dame, where people expect a great football team, even if the results of the last 20 years repeatedly have smacked them in the back of the head and said, ‘‘Wake up! It’s no longer 1988!’’