The “join a conference!” crowd is quiet these days, having evidently had eyes a little bigger than its stomach when it came to conference realignment. The same folks who giddily clamor for Notre Dame to resign themselves to the Big Ten anytime the Irish lose around New Year’s are now mourning the death of college football, the sport they’ll enthusiastically follow for the next five months. They say it’s about geography. All their arguments are about tradition. Tradition for me, but not for thee, I guess, but they probably don’t see the connection. Melodramatists dressed as analysts aren’t paid for the cohesion of their thoughts.
Whatever the narrative, Notre Dame football plays a heck of a schedule this fall by current college football measurement. The Irish play the favorites in three of the Power Five conferences, those teams comprising three of the seven or eight teams betting markets peg likeliest to win the national championship. If college football thrives these days on the SEC’s two or three top-10 matchups a year and big, interleague games between playoff contenders, fans have Notre Dame to thank for the last half of that. Specifically, they have Notre Dame’s independence to thank.
Plenty of schools schedule great competition years out. We see plenty of nonconference action featuring Alabama or Georgia and another big, ranked potential playoff contender. Florida State is playing LSU again this year. Texas is going to Tuscaloosa. What we don’t see is anyone, outside of occasional SEC Championship qualifiers, playing three of these games in a season. Hardly anybody else even plays two, which is the comparable number if you assume playing in a conference gives a playoff contender one such game naturally, by way of the conference championship. What’s really happening here is that Notre Dame has constructed a schedule where its “conference,” for football scheduling purposes, is effectively the ACC, Stanford, and USC. Seven of Notre Dame’s twelve games, on average, are played against those schools. In years when one of Stanford or USC is near the top of the Pac-12 (they’ve made a combined eight appearances in the league’s twelve championship games, so you’ve got better than 50/50 odds), there’s a 5-in-7 chance of playing at least two conference championship qualifiers, given the five ACC opponents per year. Add in Notre Dame’s own propensity to schedule national brands from the other leagues (Oklahoma in 2012, Oklahoma in 2013, Texas in 2015, Texas in 2016, Georgia in 2017, Michigan in 2018, Georgia and Michigan both in 2019, Ohio State in 2022, Ohio State in 2023, Texas A&M in 2024, Texas A&M in 2025, Alabama in 2029, Alabama in 2030, Florida in 2031, Florida in 2032, Michigan in 2033, Michigan in 2034, and we haven’t even mentioned Arkansas or Wisconsin or Michigan State or Cincinnati in here, nor a few other Michigan games), and the expectation is to play at least one playoff contender a season, and sometimes, like this year, as many as three or four. No other school outside of the SEC has this possibility.
The schedule does wane now and then. That 2018 campaign ended up featuring some weak opposition. The disintegration of Stanford and much of the ACC has created some unexpected cupcakes. But this is the case inside conferences, too, and in those conferences, teams have less power to make adjustments if their forecasted schedule difficulty starts to wane. There was a time in college football not too long ago when teams who believed they could be named national champions were seeking out other contenders, finding themselves as many chances as they could to prove it. Now, the ACC hopes like hell every season that its best team didn’t schedule someone better than it on Labor Day Weekend, because if they did, the whole conference’s margin for error is out the window.
There’s also concern about what opponents’ conference memberships could do to Notre Dame’s own schedule. If Stanford drops into the Mountain West, that upside lessens. If Stanford slides into the ACC, Notre Dame and its conference with benefits will have some new logistics to figure out. USC joining the Big Ten narrows the angle a little bit for the Irish, taking away the chance to beat both the Big Ten and Pac-12 champions in seasons when Notre Dame schedules Michigan (or Ohio State, or Wisconsin if fate is kind). For now, though, Notre Dame has multiple quality SEC brands lined up, recent history with both Oklahoma and Texas, plenty of connections within the Big Ten, and history with some of the Big 12’s new brands as well (the Irish have played all of Cincinnati, Utah, BYU, Arizona State within the last decade-ish). At the moment, the schedule is no obstacle. It’s still an asset.
I know the “join a conference” folks who are still chirping aren’t talking much about the schedule these days. It makes sense. It’s one of the strongest reasons right now supporting Notre Dame’s continued independence. But that’s why it’s important to talk about it now, as supporters of Notre Dame’s continued independence ourselves. Remember all that talk about the schedule when Clemson pounded us at the end of 2018? That’s pretty quiet when all three of Clemson, Ohio State, and USC are on the schedule and expected to knock on the playoff door.
Quick(er) Hitters
Notre Dame ended up re-signing with Under Armour, committing to another ten years with the struggling apparel brand. It’s not necessarily a bad deal. The payout’s reported to be $10M annually, around the top of such deals in college sports right now. Everyone appears to be in agreement that Nike and Adidas would supply better recruiting leverage, but Notre Dame’s decisionmakers think the cash outweighs that, and the cash will—in indirect ways—tie back to recruiting as well. There are a number of ways this could go wrong, chiefly that Notre Dame could get cut out of any recruiting consideration for recruits who commit to Adidas or Nike before choosing a school (this is especially an issue for basketball), but those aren’t the biggest concerns in the world. It is what it is, and it may have been the right decision.
In other disappointing news—this is sadder but more short-term—Jac Collinsworth and Jason Garrett are back in the booth together again this fall. This is expected, but it’s depressing. I was in school at the same time as Collinsworth, and I’ve only heard good things about him as a person, but he doesn’t rise to the moment as a play-by-play guy. Paired with the blasé-sounding Garrett, the booth just sucks. I don’t have much against either of them individually, and if either were paired with a spectacular partner, it’d be harder to complain. They’re not, though. And so it’s easy to complain.
If you want to get fired up about football season and you’re not already, Pete Sampson posted a Twitter thread covering practice on Saturday that hit the perfect level of homer. That guy’s the best.
LaPhonso Ellis was the head coach of Team Heartfire, the group that won The Basketball Tournament last week. That’s the only basketball news today, but we’ll take what we can get in the doldrums here.
The football program added a four-star running back (three-star by some ratings) to its 2025 class, earning a commitment from Justin Thurman out of Jesuit High School in Tampa. He’s Marcus Freeman’s third commitment of that group.
With a non-exhibition soccer game on the calendar in ten days, this is the last full week of Irish Summer. Do with that what you will, and we will plan to see you in seven days.
