Irish Eyes on ACC

By Jacob Shoor
SouthernPigskin.com

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Can Notre Dame thrive as a football independent if it is partnered with no Major conference? Not likely, and certainly not for long.

Before saying anything more about the ACC expanding this time, and possibly going to 16, I need to remind people of an extremely important fact regarding the interaction between the ACC and the Big East: back in late 1998, when BE Commissioner Mike Tranghese learned that the ACC had agreed to talk to Miami about expansion and knew that not only would Miami join the ACC as soon as offered but that Miami wanted BC and Syracuse to join it in the ACC and both of them would leave as well, Tranghese offered to allow the ACC to "borrow" Miami, BC, Syracuse, and Pitt, the first four Big East football schools, for football season.

Make certain to take all that in and digest it. If you need a link to read a "real" news article noting the offer: http://articles.courant.com/2003-06-12/features/0306120470_1_big-east-acc-acc-president-acc-expansion-plan

The BE was founded of, by, and for basketball interests, exclusively. And when its then short lived football experiment seemed ready to collapse, the BE acted to save its basketball by keeping all its charter members.

There is no public record that the BE cared a flip about what would happen to Virginia Tech, West Virginia, Rutgers, and Temple football.

That should underscore a point I have made repeatedly, one that wise old JoePa learned when he ran into the brick wall of BE basketball when trying to form an Eastern league for football: if it is run by northeastern natives residing in the northeast, it will not be about football to the degree it must in order to be successful. If you want your northeastern school to play Big Time football, you need to get it in a league centered and headquartered in the South or the midwest.

For all practical purposes, BE football as a Major conference is dead, and it will be totally dead if WVU gets into the SEC. What will be left will be another Conference USA in quality and fan base sizes. Even TCU cannot save it.

That I emphasize to make this point: it is all but impossible for Notre Dame to continue to partner with the BE for football scheduling and non-BCS bowls. That is like partnering with CUSA, but with fewer options.

Can Notre Dame thrive as a football independent if it is partnered with no Major conference? Not likely, and certainly not for long.

And then there is basketball. Football is King, but basketball becomes more important to the degree that you do not have Big Time football or are not part of a major conference for football. Quite simply, if Notre Dame is in a basketball conference that is weak in quality of play and/or TV drawing power, then its athletics department will be hurt, perhaps significantly. BE basketball is going to take a big hit losing Pitt and especially Syracuse, the only two BE football members that ND cares to play in basketball. And it should get worse, because now the remaining BE football members need to trim fat to protect their football by splitting from the BE basketball-onlys.

If you do not have private school Syracuse and old ND rival Pitt bridging the gap, what do WVU, Louisville, Cincinnati, USF, TCU, and even Rutgers have to do with Catholic schools that do not play 1A football? Won't their already deep resentments of especially DePaul, Seton Hall, and Providence now explode?

All that can hold that two-headed monster together is Notre Dame, and Notre Dame is not going to join BE football.

Notre Dame has been able to have its cake and wolf it down too since joining the BE for all sports save football, but those days are coming to an end. Soon, Notre Dame will make a big change.

I am not alone in seeing that the best choice for Notre Dame is the ACC. Even a sports journalist in the heart of Indiana sees that truth, which becomes obvious when you stop thinking that a school set in the midwest belongs in the midwest. Tom Davis declares emphatically that Notre Dame: "The university is an East Coast-oriented school in every way. The only thing Midwestern about Notre Dame is its physical address" http://www.news-sentinel.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110918/SPORTS/110919631 Davis says the Irish need to join the ACC.

I have detailed why in "The ACC and Orange" http://www.southernpigskin.com/ACC/view/the-acc-and-orange , emphasizing that Notre Dame needs to be East coast focused and among multiple private schools and smaller state universities, most of the conference academically elite. I can add to that by saying that Notre Dame became the nation's national program with a unique mystique precisely because it did not play a midwestern schedule and played many games on the East coast. If that history has meaning, the most important is that Irish football cannot afford to risk being tied down to the midwest. That means that joining the Big Ten would be a major risk that easily could lead to Notre Dame football made common, merely the Catholic school in the midwest, the small school out of place in many ways in a league ruled by land grant giants with at least 40,000 students.

And that means that Notre Dame needs to join the ACC before it finds itself in a bad situation with football scheduling and another one with a weak basketball conference.

The scoffers are legion, but I think that Notre Dame is serious in seeing its BE membership as helping fellow Catholic schools play major college basketball. And that desire to help other Catholic schools compete might be the final lure that gets the Irish into the ACC. Villanova wanted to move up from 1AA to BE football, but the BE football schools blocked the move because they felt, correctly, that Villanova is too small a school to add to already weak BE football with very small fan bases.

But what if Villanova is paired with Notre Dame in the ACC? If the Wildcats play Notre Dame annually in football, as well as a full ACC slate, can the jump from 1AA power to BCS AQ super conference work?

It would work this way at least: the Irish playing in Philadelphia every year, which would be great for Irish fans living from DC up to NYC as well as for the ACC. And Villanova basketball would be a remarkably strong final member for the ACC, making the league impregnable as the nation's best with the largest TV drawing power.

Does Notre Dame want to help another Catholic school compete at the top echelon? If so, agreeing to join the ACC if it also allows Villanova to join would prove the point.

Or is Notre Dame content with only 2 Catholic colleges playing Major college football? If so, Rutgers, which is located in the NYC TV market and in a state that Notre Dame recruits heavily in both revenue sports, which state's southern part is in the Philadelphia TV market, would make a nice 16th member of the ACC.