[Husker] Notre Dame jumps to ACC (mostly)

[Mike Nolan]

> 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.

I doubt either of these will happen, at least until we have some idea
what the 4 team playoff rules will be.  Some kind of 'strength of schedule'
component has been widely suggested, and that might make it disadvantageous
to schedule those 84-0 games against lower division creampuffs.  

I have my suspicion that there will be pressure to go to a 13 game schedule
by 2020. 
--
Mike Nolan