Notre Dame is in the midst of a scandal right now. Academic scandals aren’t anything new in college football. Scandals and Notre Dame however, are quite new. How this will all play out in the near and not so near future is unknown. One thing that I have learned is that you cannot predict how the NCAA will treat school infractions. Some schools look like they are staring down the barrel of a gun and wind up getting slaps on the wrists while others receive major punishments for what appear to be nominal infractions. NCAA sanctions and uniformity do not go hand in hand. Notre Dame is a school that instills passions in college football fans. Simply put, you either love them or hate them.
Overall, this is good for a college football team; the worst thing any team can invoke is apathy. How passionate are most fans about Wyoming? Regardless of the negative feelings, Notre Dame is the team that represents college football more than any other. If, some day in the future, there is no more college football and all that is known of it is just a few sentences in a history book, you can be guaranteed that one of those sentences will mention Notre Dame. I don’t write this as a Notre Dame homer. I went to Alabama. Most Alabama fans get particularly annoyed with the Notre Dame accolades.
We can make argument after argument why Alabama is historically the better team yet Notre Dame gets Rudy and the best Alabama can muster is a small, fictional blurb in Forest Gump. C'est la vie. One of the reasons Notre Dame is Notre Dame is that the school has always held itself out as being above the football factory mentality. These aren’t just words either, Notre Dame has foregone extra money and extra playing time for its players by rejecting bowl bids when it felt its team wasn’t worthy of a bowl game. Notre Dame fires coaches before they even coach a game because of lies on a résumé. However, Notre Dame doesn’t live in a bubble. Many of their decisions regarding their football team are based generating money for the team and the school . . . including their unwillingness to join a conference.
However, those profits are proving to be shortsighted in terms of getting Notre Dame back to a point of football relevancy. It is not a coincidence that Notre Dame has fallen off of the map of college football power players some twenty to twenty five years ago and has yet to really return. Notre Dame saw a glimmer of hope in 2012 but the Irish’s loss to Alabama was a very good measuring stick for just how far removed Notre Dame was from modern college football elite. Notre Dame sits at a crossroad. Giving up autonomy and money to join a conference would almost guarantee that Notre Dame will eventually get back on top of the mountain but more than the loss of revenue, Notre Dame threatens to give up its identity. As we are learning though, Notre Dame’s identity is changing even if they keep on the same path. Notre Dame of 2014 isn’t the same Notre Dame of 1989. The Notre Dame of 2039 could be the Notre Dame that instills no real passion or hatred. If Notre Dame thinks that isn’t possible, they only need to look across to their ancient arch-rival Army. Army was Notre Dame before Notre Dame was Notre Dame. College football is littered with once great giants who have all but disappeared from the ranks of the relevant.
The major difference between college football when Notre Dame was relevant and college football today is television. Look at conference realignment 1990s versus 21st Century realignment. In the early 1990s, the SEC expanded from ten teams to twelve teams. The SEC originally pursued Florida State and Miami but after being rejected by both schools, the SEC added Arkansas and South Carolina. These were easy additions that made sense based on geography and fan base. Conference realignment in the 21st Century is based on television markets. When the SEC expanded again, Florida State, Clemson, and one time SEC member, Georgia Tech were off the table. All three teams being a part of the SEC made sense as they all have their arch-rivals in the SEC. What made sense on a fan level, doomed them on a financial level. Not one of three aforementioned teams could provide much in the way of expanding the television market.
Commissioner Mike Slive understood that in order to negotiate a better contract with ESPN he had to one, obtain a product that was not already a part of the existing contract, thereby forcing ESPN to renegotiate, and two, improve the product so that ESPN would be willing to write a much bigger check. Texas and Missouri have a whole lot of new television sets. The SEC is not alone in this process. The Pac 10/12 tried to go after those same Texas television sets via an attempt to add Texas. The BigTen just added Maryland and Rutgers. All of this is for expanding television markets, which creates higher revenue, which translates into more success, which then translates into higher revenue, etc. etc. The long and short of this is that the college football middle class is shrinking and is quickly becoming a world of have and have nots. Who is to blame for all of this money above all attitude in college football? The answer is Notre Dame. In the early 1990s, as Notre Dame was near the pinnacle of its success, Notre Dame negotiated out a legendary contract with NBC in which NBC would televise every game with Notre Dame. This should have solidified Notre Dame as a powerhouse for decades.
Imagine being a coach of Notre Dame, walking into a recruit’s house and saying, you will be on National TV every single time you play. It didn’t actually work out that way. Notre Dame was slipping into mediocrity and it was on display nationally. Notre Dame had inadvertently filmed its own demise. The biggest problem Notre Dame has that other schools can avoid, is that Notre Dame has to go it alone. Instead of comparing Notre Dame to another school, it’s more accurate to compare it to another conference. Because Notre Dame is an independent, it is essentially a conference unto itself. This is great when Notre Dame is great but when Notre Dame is bad, it is the equivalent of the entire conference collapsing. Compare Notre Dame with the SEC for the last couple of decades and it becomes easily seen. In the early 1990s, when Notre Dame was on top, the top teams of the SEC were Florida and to a lesser extent Alabama. Alabama begins its descent in the mid to late 1990s and is replaced by Tennessee. When Florida has some bumpy years, LSU emerges. Tennessee disappears, Florida reappears, Alabama reappears, Florida disappears, and lately, Auburn appears. This doesn’t even factor the plethora of SEC teams with lesser successes. Tennessee, Kentucky, Vandy, Mississippi State, all make far more money now than they did twenty years ago and even three years ago. Vanderbilt in particular was a team that hadn’t played in bowl games in decades, hadn’t even been ranked in decades but managed to take the money that it was given, couple it would very good coaching hires, and return to relevance for the first time since the 1940s.
In case you are wondering, Vanderbilt’s academic requirements for enrollment of student athletes is more stringent than Notre Dame’s. During this same time, college football’s most elite program has managed to continue to lose ground. On some level, Notre Dame doesn’t want a conference to swallow its brand. The truth is that Notre Dame entering a conference would be protecting its brand. More than likely those in South Bend who could make that decision realize that entering a conference doesn’t mean losing Notre Dame. If you are looking for the real reason Notre Dame fails to join a conference, all you have to do is follow the money. Notre Dame is still a very attractive brand and Notre Dame makes a lot of money on that brand. If Notre Dame were to enter a conference and place its revenue share in the conference pot, the short term would result in Notre Dame having less money. Conferences have learned from the Texas/Big 12 debacle that allowing a team to keep a separate revenue share is essentially allowing a cancer within the conference.
Right now, the ACC and Notre Dame have worked out a deal in which Notre Dame has agreed to play ACC teams. This isn’t joining a conference so much as it is a joint venture of the ACC and Notre Dame with both hoping to fill their respective coffers. This was a much more attractive deal to the ACC before the impending Notre Dame scandal. The outcome of this scandal could certainly sour any future joint ventures for the Irish. As mentioned before, scandals are nothing new. Alabama was devastated by a scandal in the early 2000s. Penn State, a one time independent team, is trying to make its way through the forest of NCAA sanctions. USC is hoping that they are past their darkest point of the scandal that negated their national championship. I could argue that all three of these teams could stand alone as independents. USC and Alabama were Rose Bowl rivals before Rockne stepped foot on Notre Dame’s campus. All three of these teams have managed to make it through because when they were down, the conference checks kept coming in. Alabama is at the top again thanks to the successes, of Tennessee, LSU, and Florida.
I would hate to think that politics would play into any decisions by an infractions committee but if Notre Dame fans want to look for conspiracy theories, a harsh decision from the committee on infractions could almost force Notre Dame to join a conference. Even if Notre Dame only gets a slap on the wrist, they are only one major scandal away from devastation. Notre Dame, joining a conference could very quickly put the Irish on the road to relevancy. A conference adds division championships, conference championships, a larger recruiting base, television contracts based on the success of the conference and not the success of the team, in short, immediate dividends that Notre Dame could reap before the next president takes the oath of office. If it keeps going the other way, Notre Dame will drift even further down the road to apathy and will do so in the name of short term profits.
An entire generation of kids has been born and graduated college since the last time Notre Dame was actually relevant. Notre Dame’s greatest success in the 21st Century comes from an obsessed media that covers Notre Dame based on their own and their audience’s nostalgia but nostalgia is a finite fuel and needs present successes to keep producing. Notre Dame joining a conference is good for Notre Dame but it is also good for all of college football, for those that love Notre Dame and those that despise Notre Dame. It’s an investment that virtually guarantees that Notre Dame will be relevant beyond our lifetimes and not just relegated to a blurb in a history book.
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