Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Notre Dame Joins ACC...Sort Of



In typical Notre Dame fashion, they've finally elected to join the ACC solely for football reasons and managed to not actually join the conference fully for football.

It's classic hypocrisy as only the Irish can muster. They'll play five games a season against ACC competition meaning they can have their cake and eat it too.

They'll get to pick and choose which rivalries they keep and which become rarer than an ND bowl win.

They'll no doubt get special treatment and not have to paint the ACC logo on their historic and soon to be synthetic field. Perhaps the Irish will have gold-embossed portable logos for the weeks they're part of the conference that can be easily removed the rest of the time.

I'm certain there will be equal revenue sharing amongst all 15 (yikes!) ACC programs even though Notre Dame will continue to hold onto their unique television deal with NBC without sharing.

The only thing ACC commissioner John Swofford managed to leverage in favor of the existing conference members is that the Irish won't be eligible for the ACC Championship game.

It's outrageous that the ACC cowed to the demands of a prospective member like this. It shows once again that greedheads like Swofford care nothing about "student-athletes" or the integrity of their organization and only about the almighty dollar.

As Notre Dame's president, the Rev. John I. Jenkins said of the ACC's arrangement, "I don't think there's out there a better situation than the one we have."

Yeah, no crap.

As my dear friend Eric succinctly put it earlier, "I wish we weren't humoring their [Notre Dame] laughably pompous and misguided exceptionalism."

Indeed.

Here come the Irish...to the Atlantic Coast.

It's not all bad of course. People are talking about ACC football in a slightly less sarcastic way than normal which has always been a problem.

It will open ACC football to a Notre Dame fan base that is only intimately familiar with the bottom-dwellers of the league.

Most importantly, Notre Dame will finally have to take on opponents like Virginia Tech, Florida State, Clemson and Miami without being able to dictate the terms of when and where they play.

The Irish are notoriously difficult to schedule because of their insistence to make non-rival opponents play multiple games in South Bend in exchange for only one game on their own campus.

That will now only be an issue for the "non-conference" opponents, whatever that means to the Irish.

Now Notre Dame will dig into their bottomless pockets to pay what is sure to be a hefty exit fee from the Big East. They will join their new conference members on unequal footing, but what else is new?

Oh yeah, welcome to the ACC.

4 comments:

Bill said...

Slightly confused by this post. What special treatment will ND get for scheduling? The ACC dictates what teams ND will play based on the open weeks. As far as revenue, the ACC can now ask for a better TV deal because of ND, which increases the revenue for all schools.

I think you're misguided when talking about student athletes or the integrity of the organization. How does adding Notre Dame diminish the student athletes of the ACC? Adding Notre Dame just stabilized your conference, it didn't weaken it. Would you rather have the ACC without FSU and Clemson, because without ND that could have happened.

You're also incorrect on the terms for scheduling. ND does home and home scheduling, which is what every other team does, and thus we are not notoriously difficult to schedule. Do you have any examples of scheduling difficulty?

I thought VT and other ACC members would be happy to add another quality opponent to their schedules, but maybe I was wrong.

Justin Cates said...

They don't get special treatment with regards to ACC scheduling, they just get the benefits of being in our conference without actually being in our conference for the sport in question. That's the special treatment to which I'm referring.

Notre Dame has nothing to do with the lack of integrity, it's the entire landscape of college athletics that does that. This is just the latest move driven purely by money.

Tech's athletic director has said many times that when trying to schedule bigger teams they always tried to force us into a 2 for 1. I remember him referencing Penn State specifically and I thought Notre Dame, but I can't seem to find record of it right now.

I could be wrong. I'm just glad we get a shot at ND on campus instead of some stupid neutral site.

Justin Cates said...

I forgot to address your last point Bill.

I can only really speak to the Hokie perspective here, but we're mad because we begged, pleaded and did everything we could for 50 years to get into the ACC, a conference we probably should have been part of from the beginning were it not for politics and the usual nonsense of that nature.

Notre Dame coming in and dictating the terms when they were the ones invited is a giant slap in the face.

But yes, with time we'll be more welcoming. You'll find ACC football a very enjoyable enterprise from a fans perspective.

Bill said...

I'm looking forward to playing some of the better ACC teams, and excited that in the next 6 years I'll have an opportunity to see ND at Lane Stadium, hopefully at night.

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