Take it from Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick: There are bowls and there are bowls, and then there is the BCS championship game. Which is not so much a bowl as the Grand Canyon.

"There's no playbook. There's no manual for it," he said Monday at Notre Dame's bowl media day. "It's so different than any other bowl. It takes an army of our staff here to pull it all together.

"We need every day to talk about the logistics of the game -- hotel rooms and tickets and charter planes and schedules. It's phenomenal experience for our student-athletes but you can't prepare for it."

Not any single day of it.

"It's overwhelming all the time," Swarbrick says. "Not just some of the time. But you just roll with it. You work your way through it.

"Great, great cooperation all across campus with everybody pitching in to try to find a way to pull this together. It's nice you have so many days. The administrators are pretty happy to have every one of those (45) days."