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.
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| 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.
