The SEC has agreed to go to a 9 game conference schedule starting next season. Each team will have 3 protected rivalries and should see all of the other schools twice every four years (home/home.)
The ACC is standing pat with their 8 game conference schedule, at least for now.
The ESPN story cites the CFP’s recent decision to implement advance metrics for strength-of-schedule as one of the keys for making this change.
Good - the SEC needed to do this and the ACC is pretty much irrelevant. This also makes the SEC/Big Ten playoff expansion more likely, though I know the two leaders still disagree on the format exactly.
But it’s good for the game to have strength of schedule factored in and it should be. In basketball, we get those great early season games with Duke vs. Kentucky or UNC vs. Kansas because it boosts their RPI. But in football, you never wanted to have an early loss and be removed from the mix before September ended. We’ll see more Ohio State-Texas games in September because of this. And hopefully also fewer SEC bye weeks before their one tough game. 
GO CATS!!!
-SjT
My guess is the Big Ten and SEC are actually quite close, but unless the ACC falls apart, there just aren’t that many teams worth adding out there, and Notre Dame is the only really attractive team out there. I doubt the Big Ten wants Florida State, for example.
Mike Nolan
All the remaining schools besides ND are flawed:
UNC - bad football
FSU - marginal academics
Kansas - small state, bad football
Virginia - bad football
Clemson - marginal academics
Miami(FL) - private school with poor fanbase
Duke - bad football, private school with poor fanbase
Stanford - private school with poor fanbase
The privates have the hardest time justifying their membership unless they are long-time blue bloods like USC and ND with 50+ years of history and nattys.
The rest aren’t the best school in their state so they are right out.
With ND and their choice of plus one we can be done.
Notre Dame is never going to accept a conference deal that makes them only an equal to the other schools in that conference.
Don’t agree about Duke - they seem to be pretty good when hey play us…
The Evil Empire can’t guarantee a conference win every year so they have to sit on the sidelines and get into the playoffs by acclimation.
Imagine if they had to play Ioway, dOSU or Umish every year, or even Wiscy,or Minny or…
Personally, I think the Irish are a top level B1G team and they’d have to take their chances every year to be in the playoffs.
Go B1GCats
rsl
Duke has had their dry spells, they had losing seasons from 1995 through 2011. From that point they’ve had 4 losing seasons and 9 winning seasons with a 10-4 season in 2013, losing 45-7 in the ACC conference championship and losing a 48-52 shootout to Texas A&M in the Peach Bowl.
NU’s last win over Duke was in 2016, they’ve lost 6 straight since then.
I agree with CoachRoy that Notre Dame would be very competitive in the Big Ten (though I don’t think they’d dominate it) and a good fit in general, but I just don’t see them accepting equal status with the other teams and I don’t see the other conference teams giving them an advantage.