Notre Dame has posted that their relationship with the ACC was ‘permanently damaged’ by the ACC’s recent post that they interpret as favoring Miami getting into the playoffs over the Irish.
Are they looking for an excuse to break their deal with the ACC?
Good - they belong in the Big Ten. Time for ND to join a conference and time for the Big Ten to play hardball and not schedule them in any sport until they join.
It would be a big mistake for ND to leave the ACC. Trying to negotiate with 12 schools to fill out a schedule is a lot more work than only having to schedule 6 and that doesn’t include trying to do that for non-revenue sports.
Look at basketball for example generally it is non-conference for 2 months and conference games for 3 months. Can you imagine wanting to use a bye during the conference season to go to South Bend in the winter?
My sister is a long-time Gopher hockey season ticket holder and would love to drop the B1G hockey conference as Minnesotans care more about a game vs. Mankato or ND State than a game vs. Ohio State in hockey. The hockey conference would die without ND due to too few members.
It cut off the rest of my post for some reason.
I have zero sympathy for Notre Dame, they have said they value their independence and they get perks no other school in the country would dare to ask for.
Well, this year that independence came with a heavy price tag.
And while I agree that the ACC’s tiebreak rues are a mess and need to be fixed (how did a guy as smart as Jim Phillips allow that to happen?), I also don’t fault the ACC for arguing that they should get a playoff berth, because that brings money into the conference, Notre Dame getting into the playoffs does not.
The biggest problem I see with adding Notre Dame is that 19 is a messy number for scheduling. If they go looking for a 20th team, who’s worth it? FSU might be the best of the bunch, and if Notre Dame gets a get-out-of-ACC-free card, they’ll want one too.
If Notre Dame gets out of their ACC deal and FSU does as well, that could spell the end of the ACC. Maybe they’ll merge with the Pac-Whatever-it-is.
The idea of the D1-BCS teams withdrawing from the NCAA in football is looking more like the ultimate end to this. A superconference with 136 teams (the size of D1-FBS this week) would be easy to split into two leagues, one with 8-10 divisions of 8 teams each and the other with the remaining teams, also in divisions of 8 teams.
Every team plays all the teams in its division yearly. That account for 7 of the 12 games. That leaves 5 games for cross-division or cross-league games scheduling. No scheduling teams outside of the supeconference. (Sorry, Furman and Citadel.)
Divisions would be organized mostly geographically.
Designated rivals that aren’t in the same division or league can be handled by giving each team 1 or 2 designated rivals, so Notre Dame vs USC remains. Most of the other rivalries are pretty much geographic already.
Each league gets its own set of playoffs, prcbably 16 teams each. Bowls, if they still exist by then, get to pick teams that don’t make their league’s playoffs.
Every 2-3 years a number of teams (probably 8-10) get promoted up or relegated down to the other league, with divisions reformed if that breaks the geographic structure too much.
Every team can send me a $2K royalty every year.
Don’t hold your breath…
Go B1GCats
rsl
I don’t expect Notre Dame to stop whining, that’s for sure.