The road most recently traveled
Melina Myers-USA TODAY Sports
With summer upon us and any number of conference-realignment shenanigans possible in the college football landscape, I thought I would take some time over the next few weeks to survey all the different possible long-term destinations for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish and see if I could talk myself, and possibly some of you, into them. These options will include the Irish maintaining the status quo of independence along with alignment to all of the remaining major conferences: the ACC, Big 10, Big 12, and even the SEC. I’ll do my best to not tip my hand as to my own opinion during this process and just adopt the perspective of someone arguing for this, and in return I’ll ask that we keep the feedback from getting too personal.
We’ve examined what it would look like for the Irish to remain independent, and we’ve considered terra incognita in the SEC and Big 12. Now let’s look at some familiar territory and try to make the case for the Irish to #goacc on a full-time basis.
Uniquely among potential destinations, this one has actually been given a test run. The Irish temporarily became an ACC member during the 2020 season in order to avoid being left out of the sport for a year. The trial run was by all marks successful: the Irish enjoyed an undefeated (albeit abbreviated) regular season, including an upset of the then-#1 Clemson Tigers in South Bend, and earned a playoff berth despite being defeated in a rematch with a fully armed and operational Clemson in the conference championship game.
Considering the 2020 composition of the conference remains mostly intact with only a few updates (Clemson appears to have abdicated its seat as the conference king, and there are of course three new teams that have arrived from nowhere near the Atlantic Coast), there’s no reason to think that Irish teams in the years to come wouldn’t be able to replicate or exceed these results. The argument for joining the ACC thus comes to resemble the ones we made earlier for both independence and Big 12 membership - it would place the Irish at or near the top of the pecking order and provide them a clear and relatively easy path to the college football playoff in most years, including a potential first-round bye via conference title.
There are a few other things to consider here. First, unlike moving to the Big 12 or SEC, this is not a move that would upset the apple cart of college football given the precedent for it. Beyond the fact that the Irish have already played a season in the ACC, they are also - for now - legally obliged to choose the ACC as their football conference should they decide to join one. The move to the ACC is thus less likely to burn bridges between the Irish and the rest of college football, which is good news if you want to see the Irish preserve their rivalries in the Big 10.
Speaking of rivals, while most of Notre Dame’s most important and traditional rivals reside in the Big 10, the Irish do have a handful of little-r rivalries in the ACC with Miami, Pitt, Boston College, and now Stanford all calling the conference home. Notable history also exists with Clemson and Florida State. No, none of them are exciting as the Big 10 rivalries, but they are familiar opponents that would ease the transition into conference life.
Relatedly, joining the ACC as opposed to an entirely new conference would also create the least disruption to Notre Dame’s scheduling. This is simple math - the Irish would have only have to slot in a few more conference games in each year to come as opposed to creating entirely new slates. This would make it more likely that the Irish keep their currently scheduled dates with the likes of the Alabama Crimson Tide, Florida Gators, Michigan Wolverines and other opponents who would be out of conference in this scenario.
For all of these reasons as well as just unnameable but definitely real vibes, this move feels like a decent one if you are a fan of stability. That is, except for one potentially fatal flaw, which is that all of this ceases to matter in the very possible event of the ACC going the way of the Pac-12.
The demise of the Conference of Champions™ showed that conference disintegration follows Hemingway’s Law of Bankruptcy: it happens gradually, then suddenly. Behind the scenes, things had been headed south for over a decade and rumors seemed to always swirl in the offseason. But from an outsider’s perspective it all seemed very far out and hypothetical until July of 2022, when USC and UCLA shocked the world by announcing their departure. Suddenly the impossible was no longer, and over the next year and a half all but two schools in the conference had followed suit. All it took was those first two schools with the nerve to cross the Rubicon for the entire institution to break.
The ACC is already known to have at least one such malcontent in the Florida State Seminoles, who have been quite vocal about their desire to find greener pastures and liker minds in the SEC, with Clemson widely assumed to be of the same mind. The Big 10 is also suspected to be eyeing the North Carolina Tar Heels and Virginia Cavaliers. If any or all of these schools were to make the leap, it would likely not be long before their historical rivals and counterparts followed suit, leaving only a handful of orphans behind. If this were to happen Irish fans would be grateful not to have hitched their wagons to this sinking ship, and I understand if you want to murder me for that unconscionable mixed metaphor.
The flip side of this is that one could argue Notre Dame joining the ACC would forestall this possibility. An ACC with the Irish fully on board is far stronger as a football conference in terms of competition, prestige, cash and eyeballs. Maybe the conference’s antsy members would feel a little less prone to wander if they had yearly or semi-yearly matchups with what is still the biggest brand in the sport and stronger schedules to boost potential playoff resumes and avoid Florida State’s ignominious fate in the 2023 season.
This would be a calculated risk and I can’t say which outcome is more likely, or offer Pete Bevacqua a recommendation on whether to throw the ACC a lifeline or leave it to its fate. But if it did work out, a place in a stable ACC with traditional rivalries still on the schedule doesn’t seem like a terrible place to end up.
One more to go - you know which one it is. See ya next week.
