Rakes Report #147: Depend on no one else to give you what you want
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Hey friends,
Hope everyone is hanging in there. I am not going to spend a lot of time diving into the specifics of the new ACC schedule at the moment because I remain skeptical there will be football in the fall. What I am going to do is write a bit about Notre Dame and independence, an evergreen topic that has been discussed at the national level lately due to all the schedule machinations as the can of the season is kicked further and further down the road. I almost wrote something earlier this month after the Big Ten announced it was going conference-only and Notre Dame became a top Twitter trend because people thought that meant they were going to have to permanently give up football independence but I’m glad I waited because a better opportunity has presented itself.
If you are not familiar with Fire Joe Morgan, it was a 2000s-era blog in which questionable sports writing was sliced and diced. (This is my favorite entry and one of my favorite pieces of writing, period.) I do not like to crack into this format too often because it can be abused but I think now is a good time for a couple reasons. First, Friend of the Report and 18 Stripes writer Michael Bryan suggested a recent CBS Sports column would be a perfect candidate for this process, and as is so often the case, I believe he is correct.
Second, and more importantly, one of the FJM founders was Michael Schur, who you may know from his work as a sitcom genius. Schur is married to J.J. Philbin, a Notre Dame alumna and daughter of a Fighting Irish and television legend. In honor of Regis — a man who will be buried on campus, who said coming back was like entering heaven, who complained to the New York Times about their Notre Dame coverage so much they changed their Sunday paper distribution and who complimented my Brady For Heisman shirt while signing Christmas albums at the bookstore in 2005 — we will turn to a format his son-in-law made famous-ish.
Here is my attempt to work through “Why the Notre Dame-ACC marriage of convenience may evolve into a meaningful relationship beyond 2020” by Dennis Dodd. His words will be in bold, mine will be mixed in as we go. You don’t have to read this and in fact I encourage you to stop now.
Notre Dame needs the ACC, now more than ever. Just as much as the ACC needs Notre Dame.
The marriage of convenience that started in 2013 was never supposed to be consummated this way. In fact, it wasn't supposed to be a full-on marriage at all.
This all checks out so far but I would prefer sports columnists perhaps avoid unironically using “consummate” in their copy.
Notre Dame and the ACC started casually dating when the Fighting Irish went half-in seven years ago, joining the league in every sport but football. But now, the pair are cohabitating, even if only for this season.
I try to avoid talking about Notre Dame independence with people because after a decade and a half I have heard every argument against it and almost all of them are very bad. Just a heads up I don’t think this column is going to break that trend.
In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Notre Dame could play a full ACC schedule in 2020 and be eligible for the conference championship, sources told CBS Sports last week. An announcement from the conference may come as soon as this week.
The announcement came and the short version is the Irish are set to play a ten-game conference schedule while sharing their NBC money. They will have access to the ACC title game (two top teams play, no divisions this time around so the reigning two-time Coastal Division Transitive Champions won’t have a chance to take that belt for real) and Orange Bowl. All of this is a fun hypothetical in a world where a respiratory virus isn’t going to spread through college dorms, bars and house parties like wildfire.
Yup, for the first time in the Irish's 132-year history, Notre Dame would be a full-fledged member of a conference.
But will it just be a one-off -- another marriage of convenience during the pandemic -- or a preview of what's to come?
We all know the answer to this question and it doesn’t take an entire column but c’est la vie.
It's interesting. It's tantalizing. It's time to think about Notre Dame as a permanent ACC member.
Maybe it's not as far-fetched as it once sounded.
I’m regretting this exercise so much already.
For now, the ACC needs Notre Dame all-in to complete a conference "plus one" schedule similar to what is being adopted by the Big Ten and Pac-12. (The SEC and Big 12 are still publicly planning on playing 12-game seasons.)
It's already been established that, if Notre Dame joins a conference between now and 2036, it has to be the ACC. That's the length of the grant of rights deal signed in 2016.
Sure, a one-year one-off would anger a lot of ACC types.
Fact check: Extremely and hilariously true. It continues to boggle my mind that people, ACC-types or otherwise, get so worked up about Irish independence. Is it because they’re so ingrained with conference identity they can’t imagine alternatives? Is it jealousy of the freedom? It’s odd because until the 90s a ton of powerhouses were independent and it seemed like a fun time, so I guess it’s also a lack of historical knowledge? Probably a mix of all of the above. Conferences are artificial constructs and sometimes winning one means you climbed a difficult mountain but other times it just means you beat a particular group of uninspiring opponents tied together by geography and/or shared media rights.
The conference would be throwing Notre Dame a rope, allowing the Irish to parachute in and contend not only for a league title but the ACC's automatic Orange Bowl berth.
There is also a subtext here that needs to be mentioned.
This subtext is so pointless and just killing time, I’m sorry.
The ACC is still searching for a commissioner with John Swofford set to depart in June 2021. Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick has been mentioned as a candidate. At 66, Swarbrick was behind the ACC-Notre Dame union in 2013. He is at the top of his profession, one of the most powerful persons in college athletics.
Outside of his refusal to build a statue garden honoring the basketball teams, Swarbrick really has done a nice job as athletic director and is extremely well respected across all of college athletics, which makes the vitriol saved for him by certain Notre Dame fans very funny. I think it’s reasonable to say it would be a better ACC deal if the Irish were only locked into four ACC games instead of five, but with the variety of opponents it’s a decent enough deal, especially considering how poorly things could have gone with conference realignment.
But a commissioner is a commissioner: more power, more money. What if Swarbrick delivered Notre Dame as a full ACC member as his walk-off?
He would not be allowed to return to his alma mater. It’s one thing that you and me and our friends like being independent in football, but as Pete Sampson wrote in The Athletic last year, at least some of the people who cut the big checks also like independence. This is a quote from John Baumer, an alum who has donated many millions:
“That keeps people proud of their institution and you’d lose that if you’d go into the Big Ten or the ACC. It would be such a regionalized schedule that I think that would make it tougher to maintain those relationships with the alumni deep into their careers, especially later in their careers when they’re more in the mode of giving back. I think that’s critical.”
If that changes, then the university will shift its priorities accordingly, but for now, if the vox populi don’t want it and the donors don’t want it, there’s no real reason to do it outside of making all of your alumni angry which doesn’t seem like great business.
The same could be said of Clemson AD Dan Radakovich. His name has come up, too. On his watch, the Tigers have reached the pinnacle of their football existence.
Folding the Irish into the league preserves the Notre Dame-Clemson game this season. Maybe the winning AD gets the commissioner's job?
Uggggh.
The ACC has already solidified itself with the aforementioned grant of rights and its own network. As a half-brother, Notre Dame is a curious partner. The Irish might be the No. 1 brand in college sports. That's why NBC is paying it $15 million to show its home games.
It's also likely the biggest stumbling block to Notre Dame's full-time ACC fantasy.
I can’t tell if the “biggest stumbling block” here is referring to the Irish being the No. 1 brand or the NBC deal. I hope it’s the former because I don’t know how you can be a person who writes about college sports professionally for a national outlet and not know by now that Notre Dame loses money by being a football independent. The total paid out to full ACC teams is more than the NBC money plus the partial ACC share Notre Dame gets. I’m sure someone in South Bend has calculated the value of independence to a dollar figure but just in straight media rights Notre Dame would make more money by joining the ACC and could make way way way more if they join the Big Ten. This is a tradeoff so we don’t have to pretend it’s actually good to have annual games against Rutgers and Northwestern.
But sooner or later, there will be factors that push the Irish toward that ultimate decision.
For now, it's the coronavirus. What started as Notre Dame needing a place to park its football program has turned into the ACC needing Notre Dame to bolster its season.
The Irish created their ACC scheduling agreement in football out of necessity.
When the College Football Playoff started in 2013, Notre Dame didn't have automatic bowl access. The Rose Bowl was taken by the Big Ten and Pac-12. The SEC and Big 12 partnered in the Sugar Bowl. The ACC champion played in the Orange Bowl during years when it wasn't in the playoff.
It’s very weird to talk about this and not mention the Big East at all, which was seemingly in the process of dissolving when the Irish jumped ship. Notre Dame announced their move to the ACC in September 2012, but dominoes had already begun to fall all the way back in 2003 when Virginia Tech, Miami and Boston College switched from the Big East to ACC. Things picked up again in September 2011 when the ACC formally extended invitations to Syracuse (an original Big East member) and Pitt (Pitt), which was followed by the Big 12 poaching West Virginia to join in October 2011.* At that point it seemed like the Big East wouldn’t even exist, and it was as much about finding a safe home for all the other Irish sports as it was anything else.
* There was also TCU, which accepted an invitation to join the Big East in November 2010, a few months after their Mountain West brethren Utah Utes inked a deal with the Pac-12. In November 2011, the Horned Frogs flipped to the Big 12 when they got a better, safer, more geographically sound offer.
There was also the concern that leagues were going to limit their non-conference schedules and make it difficult for Notre Dame to put together a quality twelve-game slate, particularly when it came to November contests. The ACC deal allows flexibility but also means the Irish never are stuck trying to fill in too many schedule holes.
Also, the playoff started in 2014.
That's not to say Notre Dame couldn't go to a bowl. It just didn't have any spots reserved for it. Those went mostly to schools in conferences. It was amazing to see Notre Dame so vulnerable.
This is tied to the previous paragraph as well. Notre Dame would have still been able to go to what they called “access bowls” in the original June 2012 announcement and what we now call the New Years Six bowls, they just couldn’t play in the Rose or Sugar in non-playoff years which hey they can’t now in the biggest tragedy of this whole thing. Nothing in the initial playoff announcement or any adjustment to the rules since says conference champions only, which would indeed be very bad for the Irish (and also the SEC, who wants a chance at multiple teams getting in every year like they did in 2017).
It is true that Notre Dame would have been in trouble in years where they failed to make one of the top bowls, and it’s also true joining the ACC helped the ACC get better options. (Hello, Holiday Bowl – someday, my love.) Major bowl access was probably below lower bowl access and Olympic sport stability, but perhaps I am misremembering priorities.
There continues to be a fine balance. There would be no legitimate CFP without the Irish. The ACC Network wouldn't be as valuable without them. In fact, there might not be an ACC Network at all without Notre Dame.
Accurate. While we’re talking about how important Notre Dame is to the league, you could also mention how many ACC schools have their largest crowds of the season when the Irish come to town. Most of those athletic departments also don’t allow the sale of single-game Notre Dame tickets, instead putting them in with multi-game or even season ticket packages, so there’s another benefit.
Since 2014, Notre Dame has also brought “College GameDay” with them on three ACC road trips, in addition to Athens, Philly and hosting the 2018 season opener.
Viewed objectively, independence has been a blessing and a curse. Critics resent the program's ability to "massage" its schedule to its advantage. The Irish don't go through the week-to-week grind of a conference schedule, but history reflects that deficiency.
“Critics resent” is just nonsense — who are we talking about? Randos on Twitter and opposing message boards? Who cares. In this analysis of college football schedules from 1998 to 2017, Notre Dame finishes all the way down at ninth. Anyone who says the Irish play an easy schedule is either misinformed or mendacious and it is your choice on whether to educate or ignore and move on with your life.
It is true that Notre Dame’s schedule is more volatile because within a conference you’re probably going to have some orderly separation of teams so that one or two are Tier A, a few more are Tier B, and so on down the line unless all the coin flip games are truly coin flips and everyone is 4-4 in conference play. This will in most cases ensure some marquee and semi-marquee games, even if the opponents just grew fat taking care of mediocre league opposition. Because the Irish are pulling from separate pools, they could conceivably catch a bunch of opponents on down years or up years within the same autumn and get a schedule that is too easy or too hard, but in the grand scheme, it works out.
I genuinely do not know what “history reflects that deficiency” means in this context. If you do, please reach out.
In the BCS and College Football Playoff eras (since 1998), it's clear Notre Dame has to go to undefeated to contend for a national championship. We know this because that's the only way it has qualified -- in 2012 (BCS) and 2018 (CFP).
This is not “clear.” It’s technically true but it’s also bullshit because Notre Dame never had a one-loss regular season team in the BCS or CFP Era, which is pretty wild when you think about it. If Notre Dame had not covered themselves in gasoline before heading to Miami Gardens and Palo Alto in 2017, they would have cruised into the playoff at 11-1. 2015 they maybe get screwed at 11-1, but they would have been edged out by an Oklahoma team that also only played 12 games.
This is where I point out that both Ohio State and Alabama have made the playoff at 11-1 despite not even winning their division and that Ohio State was left out of the playoff at 12-1 two years in a row after winning their conference title game because they were blown out by Iowa and Purdue in consecutive seasons.
It’s a very simple format we have discussed before: Notre Dame is in at 12-0, they’re out at 10-2, and at 11-1 it’s going to depend on myriad other factors.
Notre Dame also doesn't have to put it all on the line in a conference championship game -- by choice. The Irish play only 12 regular-season games. That means they also don't have that extra data point to add their resume.
This is getting boring: Notre Dame plays 12 FBS opponents every season. Your average conference championship game participants, with a few exceptions, also play 12 FBS opponents every year. If it would please the crowd, we could blow out an FCS team somewhere in there. Additionally, some of these teams aren’t facing the toughest competition for their 13th game, unless it means more that Clemson beat Pitt and Virginia (who Notre Dame defeated) or Ohio State beat Northwestern (who Notre Dame defeated) on a neutral field versus in a college stadium. Sometimes, like in the SEC, it’s truly a clash of great teams, but other times it’s perfunctory.
It also needs to be stated that conference title games exist for a couple of reasons, and none of them particularly noble or good. The biggest reason is that they’re just money grabs because conferences will do anything for extra cash. The other, for the more bloated leagues, is that they expanded so much that teams can go years without playing one another* so the conference title game is needed to connect the geographic monstrosities they’ve created so you don’t have your two best teams potentially go the whole season without meeting. They are also relatively new when you look at the long history of college football.
* For example, Notre Dame has played more regular season games against Georgia in the last decade than Alabama.
The prospect of seeing Notre Dame play for a conference title is enticing. If nothing else, 2020 could serve as a look-in or trial run for Notre Dame as an ACC member.
Swarbrick told The Athletic last year that Notre Dame would be "much better off" going all-in with the ACC. The money would definitely be bigger. Even with and the CFP distribution, Notre Dame's revenue doesn't approach that of an average Power Five program.
This would have been a useful piece of information to include above!!!! Also, maybe you should have included some of Swarbrick’s other quotes from that piece instead of wishcasting him bringing the Irish into the ACC as he became commissioner for the league. Here’s the quote that immediately follows Swarbrick saying they’d be better off financially:
“But it is the broader value it produces. And this is the dynamic that’s always a bit hard to articulate and engage in for the fans just focused on whether you’re going to win the national championship. That is very important to all of us, but the decisions we make don’t just drive to that question.”
And here’s another one:
“It’s so much coded into the DNA of the place. It starts with the founder, who was remarkably independent in a host of ways. It starts with the early success of football right at a time where you couldn’t join club, because of the politics that have been chronicled about that period of time.”
(Thanks to Pete for the great work on this.)
That doesn't mean Notre Dame is walking down the aisle with the ACC. It's a different program. Independence cannot always be clearly quantified. Notre Dame considers itself a separate entity. That was never more evident than last year when president Dr. John Jenkins basically threatened the NCAA at the end of a contentious investigation.
Give us our wins back, please.
National championships don't necessarily figure into the equation of Notre Dame being on its own. Some Irish fans will hate that, but they'll have to accept it.
I mean, sure, it’s difficult for a private university in northern Indiana that maintains some level of admission and academic standards to compete for national titles, but it’s not impossible. Unless we’re moving campus to the Atlanta or Charlotte suburbs as part of joining the ACC, I’m not sure it changes the situation for the better although it would probably result in an easier schedule most years.
Independence allows scheduling freedom. It allows coast-to-coat marketing of the school. Swarbrick is especially fond of the Shamrock Series that allows high-profile neutral-site games. This year, that was scheduled to be Wisconsin at Lambeau Field.
Yeah, this all kicks ass. This argument is much better than any of the other speculative nonsense. Here’s another Baumer quote from the Sampson article:
“It is a little bit of the United Nations in South Bend, which is great, because it’s very different dynamic than other schools. Regardless of where you live in the country, there’s a good chance, because of that independence, you’re going to see Notre Dame rolling through every year, every few years.”
The arguments for Notre Dame remaining in a conference in this column all make a lot of sense. The arguments against are specious at best and magical thinking mumbo jumbo at worst. This did not need to be written.
Independence allows Notre Dame broad exposure on other networks. CBS chose to televise last year's Notre Dame-Georgia game in primetime. It was the second-highest rated game of the season behind LSU-Alabama.
You make a compelling point that Notre Dame plays in primetime nearly every time it hits the road and is always a huge draw and there’s no reason for it to join a conference. You should have put this at the top and reworked the entire premise of the column!!
For one season -- if it is played -- Notre Dame in the ACC will to be a blast: a conference schedule, possibly a conference championship game.
98 percent of my brain has ruled out any college football but the broken two percent that clings to hope is just beyond excited about the possibility of dipping in for one year, winning the ACC title and then just casually wandering back to independence in 2021. It would make people so mad and would be absolutely delightful. The trophy in this situation should be boxed up like the Ark of the Covenant in “Raiders” and buried in the archives.
The world would finally get a glimpse of the Irish in a league. We can dream, question, criticize and revel in it.
Then we can ask: Will it ever happen again?
The column is over – hurray! To that final question, it’s certainly possible. I can’t sit here and tell you Notre Dame will never join a conference for football but in the near-term, there’s little reason unless the pandemic starts affecting multiple seasons and it’s the only reasonable way to keep things going. Independence allows the Irish to play a robust national schedule - Ohio State, Alabama, Wisconsin, Texas A&M and Arkansas are all coming down the pike, in addition to the ACC and Pac-12 regulars plus reunions with Sparty and Purdue. Perhaps even more important than that, it makes people who aren’t Notre Dame fans so mad. Huge plus.
There is one argument that Dodd didn’t make that I don’t agree with but at least understand: Being in a conference gives you the goal of a division or league title even if you lose your second game early and are out of the playoff conversation, providing some November purpose if September and October are not in your favor. I am very comfortable with the tradeoff where Notre Dame is shooting for playoff bids, with the secondary goals being big wins over rivals and bowl trophies, but I can see how someone who only knows conference life could make that case in good faith.
I think these circumstances would be a tougher sell if Notre Dame wasn’t Notre Dame, but the fact that even when the Irish are average most of their games are still big deals makes it easier to justify. It would be worth reconsidering if their November games were regularly played in front of half-empty stadiums, but that isn’t the case save for the Stanford Exception.
In conclusion: Independence is cool and I remain a fan of it even if we have to deal with arguments like this every so often.
Well, that went on way too long but I think that’s it? Thanks so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed it. Just a heads up that TeePublic is having a sale through Friday night if you were looking at any merch. Otherwise please stay safe and healthy and we will find out together in the coming weeks whether or not there will actually be football.
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