[Husker] Notre Dame jumps to ACC (mostly)

[Steve Schmadeke]

If it does affect Notre Dame's series with the Big 10 teams, I wonder if enough dominoes fall to resurrect the Big 10-Pac 12 scheduling agreement.  I know that the official party line was that since the Pac 12 wasn't willing to fully commit every team to the agreement, the Big 10 wasn't interested in the deal.  I wonder if that all-or-nothing stance is reduced if the Notre Dame series are squeezed out of the schedule.

Similarly, I wonder if one of the side effects would be to bring back the idea to go to a nine-game conference schedule.  I never liked the idea much because of the scheduling math.  If you go with the assumption that everybody in the conference needs a seven-five home-road split because of revenue requirements, a nine-game conference schedule means that every other year you must have zero non-conference road games.  That leaves room for only one typical home-and-home series against a quality non-conference opponent each year, with the home game in the series scheduled for the year in which you play five road conference games.  While Nebraska could make that work, teams like Iowa (Iowa State) and Purdue, Michigan and Michigan State (Notre Dame), who want to preserve a slot for a particular non-conference opponent, no longer have any room to play any other significant non-conference games.

Let's see.  Notre Dame would be committed to five ACC games.  There is also Navy and USC that I don't see going away.  That's seven.  I think they have a new agreement with newly-independent BYU to play over the next decade.  That's eight.  Stanford has been a mainstay on the schedule, giving the Irish a road game to the west coast every year.  That's nine.  Depending on any other commitments, that would barely leave enough room for the three Big 10 opponents.  But, of course, they do have many other commitments in the near future, including various showcase games at neutral sites. (I think they make an appearance in Jerry's World in the next year or two.)

There is a pretty good chance that they will need to schedule breaks in the various series with the Big 10 teams, similar to the break currently scheduled for the 2018 and 2019 seasons in the 25-year contract with Michigan.  Instead of playing the three Big 10 schools every year, the scheduling frequency may drop to "most" years for those schools.  I also don't see the Big 10 schools solely bearing the burden of freeing up slots in the schedule.  BYU and Stanford may also be affected by skipped years.

In any case, as much as I am happy that Nebraska found a stable home in the Big 10, I hope we don't become so insular as to go to the nine-game conference schedule.

On Sep 12, 2012, at 8:18 AM, Mike Nolan <nolan at tssi.com> wrote:

> In a move that Notre Dame says "isn't about money", Notre Dame
> will become the 15th member of the ACC (at least for now), probably 
> no earlier than 2015, in all sports except hockey and football.  They 
> will be required to play 5 games against ACC opponents in football.
> 
> This may affect their long-standing series with Purdue, Michigan and
> Michigan State.  
> --
> Mike Nolan
> 
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