re: ABC Just Showed ND’s Schedule

Meh I see 6 road games, 2 MAC teams, the 2 service academies, 8 games against power conferences, Texas A&M, Florida State, and USC… not the worst I’ve ever seen by a long shot.

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The ACC agreement, in particular, is looking like a dead fricking anchor this year.


Why the ACC? Why not the Big 10? Just feel like geographically they make more sense there plus that's where all of their biggest rivalries are, especially now that USC is there. But even before USC joined you had Michigan, Sparty, Purdue, Northwestern, plus Indiana is an in-state team. I know ND has some history with BC GT and Pitt and even Miami to an extent but all those feel more secondary to their Big 10 counterparts. At least as an outside observer, I always particularly liked the ND/Sparty game as they always seemed to produce fun results and games.

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I mean, there have been literal entire books written about the historical enmity between the Big Ten and Notre Dame - there is still an absolute shite load of bad blood there for a ton of reasons, some legit on ND's end (wanting to maintain a truly national schedule footprint in large part because they want to recruit heavily in the South and West Coast, Big Ten academia tending to look their noses down on religious schools, etc.), and some not so legit, at least any longer (the anti-Catholicism of the major B10 schools especially Michigan going back a century or more, getting blackballed by the conference for decades, etc.).

To your point, ND / Sparty (and ND / Purdue like in Rudy) only became a thing because the other Big Ten schools (namely Michigan and OSU) refused to play ND for a very long time because they feared ND kicking their asses would convert even more of the highly Catholic local populations of their states into ND fans. MSU and Purdue said F that, we don't care about that, and we'll play them, anyway. Hence things like the Game of the Century in 1966.

Georgia Tech is the best or second best team on that roster. Hell the refs had to give them the game against Aggie. If they make the playoffs, they are essentially a bye week for whomever plays them.

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They don’t play road games?

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Yeah, they somehow managed to have only 3 true road games. The rest are technically "neutral site" games.

I hate ND as much as anyone but this schedule isn't that bad. It's tougher than what they usually play. For example, almost every team from the ACC has an easier schedule.

Yeah idk what we’re getting at here with this thread.

A lot of those schools on their schedule are historically good/tough teams. It’s not NDs fault they’ve started to suck.

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Notre Dame’s dilemma. If they don’t join a conference, they’ll never be eligible for a 1st round playoff bye. But if they join a conference, they’ll have to play a real schedule and won’t be able to go 11-1 and get into the CFP nearly as often

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There is no dilemma.

Under current playoff format, a 12-0 or 11-1 Notre Dame will almost always end up being the 5 seed since they can't get a top 4 seed. Also, they likely have an "easy" path to the College Football Playoff Semifinals, every year, in the current format.

Instead of a Conference Championship game for their 13th game of the season, Notre Dame will just consider their 1st round home playoff game as its "Conference Championship." The 5 seed gets the 12 seed, which will most likely be the Group of 5 school.

Notre Dame wins that round 1 game, and then they get to play the 4 seed in the Quarterfinals, which will probably be the ACC or Big 12 Champion, thus avoiding the SEC and Big 10 until the Semifinals.

So not only does Notre Dame have a soft Regular Season schedule, they have a path to the Semifinals every single year. There is no reason at all for Notre Dame to consider joining a Conference.

It's a conference USA schedule with a tough out of conference

Notre Dame will not go undefeated , and they won't come close to the title