Madison Taylor

There are many different ways to view the announcement on Wednesday that Notre Dame will be joining the Atlantic Coast Conference.

♦ It’s a logical step in the geography-impaired rush to grow college athletic conferences with the gusto usually seen in kudzu. The bigger conferences, as current thinking goes, will inherit what remains of the college sports earth and the addition of Notre Dame positions the ACC near the top of that scramble for TV-generated dollars largely stemming from football.

♦ It’s a move that puts the private institutions on nearly equal footing with their public counterparts. The addition of Notre Dame gives the ACC seven private schools among its soon-to-be 15 members. That’s the largest number of private schools in any Bowl Championship Series-affiliated league.

♦ The ACC gets Notre Dame in every sport but the most important one — football.

♦The ACC, still based in little ol’ Greensboro, taps into a huge new media market, the Midwest. South Bend, Ind., home of Notre Dame, is two hours from Chicago. That firmly places the league into four of the nation’s largest media centers: New York, Chicago, Washington and Atlanta.

♦ The deal culminates nearly 20 years of courtship between the ACC and Notre Dame — the university every major conference covets because of its national following and lucrative TV connections. The biggest losers in the announcement: The Big East, which without Notre Dame appears headed for the margins of college sports, and the Big 10, which courted the Fighting Irish for years but refused to budge on allowing Notre Dame to remain a football independent.

♦And it combines schools with strong commitments to academics as well as athletics. Administrators at the University of North Carolina, Duke and Wake Forest are either Notre Dame graduates or were employed there as administrators.

Yes, fans of the University of North Carolina, N.C. State, Duke and Wake Forest — the traditional Big Four from which the ACC was first drafted from the original Southern Conference — watched Wednesday as the tender plate tectonics of the college sports landscape shifted once again. The ACC’s Council of Presidents voted unanimously to accept Notre Dame as the league’s 15th member during a meeting in Chapel Hill.

It’s a complicated and vexing agreement that at once advances the ACC again to a leadership role in collegiate athletics while allowing Notre Dame to keep what it prizes most: football independence. Rather than compete for an ACC football championship, Notre Dame will maintain  its cash-machine TV pact with NBC while agreeing to play five ACC schools a year on a rotating basis. A complex bowl agreement would put Notre Dame in the mix with ACC schools but only under certain conditions.

There is no guarantee Notre Dame will ever join the conference for football and ACC Commissioner John Swofford said no plans exist to expand the league to 16 teams, which would almost certainly necessitate a change in Notre Dame’s position, or the addition of a second team to balance the football schedule.

While it doesn’t seem to make sense to take Notre Dame in every sport but the most lucrative one, Swofford said that is the nature of college sports today. Until Wednesday, the league’s position has always been that all league teams participate in all sports.

“We are in our 60th year as a conference, and we’ve always been an all-in conference. In recent years, we have discussed this with the changing landscape out there in intercollegiate athletics. It’s a changing world,” Swofford said.

While the move may help ensure the ACC’s future — Florida State and Clemson made noise about leaving earlier this year but seem to be solidly behind the conference today — it’s almost certainly the end of the Big East, where Notre Dame has been a member for 17 years. The Fighting Irish follow Syracuse and Pittsburgh, two private schools that left the Big East for the ACC last July.

In the survival of the fittest world of college sports today, the ACC probably got healthier on Wednesday.  But how long can conferences gorge themselves by gobbling up new members at a fast-food rate before toppling under the weight of empty bowl and TV deals, fan unrest, lost rivalries, travel costs and academic concerns?

Time will tell.

—————

 AUTHOR’S NOTE: A few years ago, someone came up with the idea to match ACC team mascots with characters on “The Simpsons.” What characters would be appropriate for Syracuse, Pittsburgh or Notre Dame?

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.