I find myself excited these days when conference realignment rears its head, and it seems this is an unusual reaction among fans of college sports. Conference realignment is a villain in today’s day and age, a reminder of the soulless money-grabbing nature of semi-amateur athletics, a force separating traditional rivals and breaking apart regional competition as more and more of culture plays out on one national Main Street. For many programs in college football’s middle class, it is a near-existential threat.
It’s a good time to be Notre Dame in the realignment world. This wasn’t always the case. Today, Notre Dame can triangulate between the Big Ten and SEC, always holding the threat of joining one above the head of the other should the other attempt to restrict our path to the College Football Playoff. Thirteen years ago, when the Big 12 first looked like a sitting duck for poaching powers—Nebraska off to the Big Ten, the then Pac-10 inviting Texas and Oklahoma and others—things were not so rosy. Then as now, the threat existed of individual conferences coalescing so much power that a team otherwise worthy to play for the national championship could be kept from the field solely thanks to collegiate geopolitics. European–soccer-style promotion and relegation don’t formally exist in American sports, but during that 2010 summer, the threat emerged that Notre Dame could be effectively relegated from college football’s top division. Through Jack Swarbrick’s cleverness and Manti Te’o’s heart and no small amount of luck—the kind of grace from the universe that makes you wonder if Lou Holtz was right about God’s mother having a favorite football team—Notre Dame survived the shifting sands, emerging in this round of realignment as a power equal in influence to each of two separate collections of 16 premier football brands.
This isn’t the first time Notre Dame has pulled off the escape.
I think the reason realignment excites me so much is that when it does roar up from the deep, it puts others in Notre Dame’s shoes. Notre Dame did not choose independence. Not originally. Notre Dame would have, history tells us, gladly accepted an invitation to the Western Conference, joining Purdue, Chicago, Illinois, Minnesota, Northwestern, Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio State, and one other school in what would ultimately become the Big Ten. That one other school, history tells us, said no, Fielding Yost leading a boycott that drove the boys he viewed as working-class immigrant scum across the country, taking on Army in New York and Southern Cal in Los Angeles. In college football’s earliest days, Notre Dame was the one whose regional competition and traditional rivalries were ripped apart by politics. In college football’s earliest days, Notre Dame was the institution facing what was very much an existential threat. Not only did Yost’s ploy backfire, turning Notre Dame into a brand with a national following built upon and treated with religious zeal, but it may have ultimately saved the university. Would the United States Navy have sent twelve thousand young men to train in South Bend throughout World War II had Admiral Nimitz not respected the football program Knute Rockne built? Fielding Yost certainly bears responsibility for Notre Dame being the entity it is today. He may have also accidentally saved the school’s life.
But Yost’s blackballing didn’t save Notre Dame in and of itself. That’s the secret which lies below the surface of all these conference realignment fears, and it holds the beauty which does exist at the center of the practice. Notre Dame survived the very first wave of Big Ten expansion not only because it had to play the very best in all corners of the country. Notre Dame survived because Notre Dame won those games.
As was the case with the Big 12’s littler guys in that 2010 realignment surge, as has even been the case with Notre Dame at times these last fifteen years, a number of Pac-12 football programs currently stare at the prospect of their own mortality. Oregon State. Washington State. Arizona. Cal. Fears exist all around what’s left of the Pac-12 Conference that when the page is turned on this chapter of college football history, the next one will find them mid-major institutions, relegated to the world of Bowling Green and Fresno State and Nevada. There’s a simple way out of this morass, though, and it’s trying—Boise State has come so torturously close—but it’s proven: If you want to be a big-time college football program, win like one. It worked for Knute Rockne a century ago. It’s worked for TCU over the last thirty years. If the Pac-12 really does dissolve, and if schools are left waiting for a chance to climb back the next time realignment surges to the surface, it’s not the end of the story. Win enough over a long amount of time—a different amount for every school, but amounts are there—and you will have merit. Since college football’s earliest days, this has always been the case.
As for Notre Dame: We say this often, but we do that because we think it’s not understood enough by our companions in this Notre Dame community. Notre Dame exists today because of football. It’s not that Notre Dame would be different without football in its past. It’s that without the sport of football, Notre Dame might not exist at all. Football is more integral to Notre Dame than it is to any other school in the world. Remove football and there would still be a university of Alabama. There would not be a Notre Dame. Realignment season is a good time to remember that.
Quick(er) Hitters
No men’s basketball news this week. The soccer programs released their schedules, making the first competition of the academic year currently on the calendar the women’s team’s August 17th visit from UW–Milwaukee.
Football strength coach Matt Balis resigned unexpectedly, citing personal reasons. It’s unclear what those reasons are, but in a strange situation, we hope everybody’s ok.
On the topic of the Navy and Notre Dame, three-time national champion at Notre Dame and two-year U.S. Navy veteran Johnny Lujack passed away on Tuesday at the age of 98. Prayers for him and his loved ones; condolences to those who grieve. Notre Dame would not be what it is without Johnny Lujack.
