The ACC has a big Notre Dame problem, and it’s not the 28-game football losing streak

The ACC has a big Notre Dame problem, and it has nothing to do with the 28-game regular-season losing streak to the Fighting Irish that N.C. State will try to end Saturday.

It’s not even that Notre Dame refuses to become a full football member of the league, although that would have solved the ACC’s revenue problems in a way that the addition of Cal, SMU and Stanford will not.

A decade into the ACC’s half-pregnant arrangement with Notre Dame, where all sports but football and hockey are members of the ACC in return for a 20 percent share of league revenue and a handful of football games against ACC teams, the problem is that Notre Dame gets a full vote in league matters — including those that unavoidably involve football.

Like a misguided transcontinental expansion.

And since football is the end-all, be-all of college athletics at this point, the driving force behind every single decision made from realignment to television partners, a black hole colleges hurl money into at the expense of everything else, as long as Notre Dame insists on remaining independent, its interests are inevitably going to be diametrically opposed from the ACC’s.

What’s good for ACC football is bad for Notre Dame, and what’s good for Notre Dame football is bad for the ACC, but Notre Dame has been one of the loudest voices in the room on leaguewide matters that all revolve around football.

It’s football, all the way down.

In other words, they’ve traced the call, and it’s coming from the inside.

That was clear to ACC insiders during the summer of 2021, when Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey tried to slide a CFP expansion plan tailor made for the Irish and SEC past the ACC and everyone else, possessed of the secret knowledge that the SEC was going to add Oklahoma and Texas. When the SEC news broke in the middle of the league’s annual football kickoff and ACC commissioner Jim Phillips wordlessly escorted Swarbrick — present at an ACC football event because the athletic directors meet there — into a conference room for an emergency meeting. The ACC pushed back against Notre Dame then, leading the way in pumping the brakes on the way to the current, different 12-team plan.

Now, the rest of the world can see it in 20-foot high flaming letters. Swarbrick argued as loudly as anyone for the ACC to add Cal and Stanford, two irrelevant football brands that won’t do any long-term damage to Notre Dame but have the potential to drag the ACC further down. In fact, since Notre Dame intends to continue to play Stanford annually as a nonconference opponent, this helps Notre Dame more than the ACC by buoying the Cardinal’s schedule strength and ensuring its status as a Power 4 team.

Well played.

Meanwhile, the ACC could have increased revenue in a meaningful way, and without this rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul Ponzi scheme that basically takes money that would have been going to Cal and Stanford and SMU and gives it to everyone else — and that bill will come due over the next 13 years, when there are more mouths scrabbling at a smaller pie — if Notre Dame had been willing to become a full football member.

That is, of course, anathema … unless it serves Notre Dame’s interests, as it did during the 2020 COVID season. The Irish even played for a conference title, without tears materializing from Touchdown Jesus’ eyes or fire and brimstone raining down from above. The timing was terrible for the ACC; playing meaningful games in November might have meant something to Irish fans if they hadn’t been CFP-worthy that season, even after losing to Clemson. Instead, the ACC just cost one of its own teams a spot in Charlotte.

(The Tigers spared, at least, everyone having to look at a Notre Dame ACC football title banner, although the Irish would probably hang it in a closet somewhere rather than acknowledge they spent a semester slumming it.)

The ACC let the Irish off the hook then, just as it did when they joined, but that’s a little bit of hindsight. At the time, the COVID lifeline felt like the first wedge in a door that never really opened. Circumstances did not play to the ACC’s favor, just as they have not during this embarrassing losing streak that has seen Notre Dame win a few big games and beat up on a lot of bad ACC teams forced to play the Irish when they might have preferred not.

Of the 28 wins since 2017 — and Notre Dame has twice lost to Clemson in the postseason over that span — thirteen came against Boston College, Duke (amid its recent, now terminated, swoon), Georgia Tech, Syracuse and Virginia Tech. Those teams haven’t exactly fared very well against anyone in that timeframe. The ACC wasn’t exactly sending its best.

From a strictly football perspective, the scheduling partnership hasn’t been a bad one for the ACC, forcing teams to play better schedules and bringing in a marquee box office and television draw on a regular basis. Fans might complain about losing to Notre Dame, but it beats sitting through four hours against Troy. And Duke and N.C. State, at least, can both claim memorable wins over the Irish they might not have otherwise, the Wolfpack in a hurricane, the Blue Devils in South Bend.

Swarbrick has made it clear the Irish are only interested in joining a conference if they lose access to the CFP — that’s not going to happen — or they don’t have a media partner. There’s still a chance NBC could make things difficult for Notre Dame in its next deal, starting in 2026, whether financially or by putting almost all of Notre Dame’s home games on Peacock, since NBC has gone all in with the Big Ten on Saturdays, but based on Swarbrick’s recent public statements, Notre Dame would be as likely to pursue membership in the Big Ten as adhere to the written agreement that if Notre Dame joins a football conference it has to be the ACC.

And as a 20 percent partner in the ACC, the math is a lot easier for Notre Dame to wriggle out of the grant of rights long before 2036 than it is anyone else, and it’s not like adding three schools the Big 12 didn’t want suddenly made the ACC more attractive to Notre Dame. The ACC has left everything up to Notre Dame, including its own business. Notre Dame’s president co-chaired the search committee that hired Phillips — someone with deep professional and personal ties to South Bend — and not only voted for expansion but pushed it on the ACC. Whose interests did Notre Dame have at heart in those critical moments? Not the ACC’s.

At some point, maybe the other ACC presidents will stop listening to Notre Dame, but until then, the Irish will continue to play the ACC for a sucker. The least the ACC can do is fight back on the football field, for a change.

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