Why Notre Dame Needs a Conference Affiliation

I follow business in a big way.  And today, I read an article about how the fundamentals are against the old-line newspaper businesses (New York Times, Washington Post, and other print media).  That industry and its dominant players must adapt or they will die.  And it made me wonder if there were any sports parallels in the college football world.  Are there any schools that have been in a great, even powerful, position in the past that are soon going to face an adapt or die type of decision?

And I believe that the "fundamentals" are stacked against Notre Dame continuing to thrive as an Independent.

To understand where I'm coming from, first we must examine what have been Notre Dame's traditional strengths and then how those factors are fading in either their influence or their reliability.

Notre Dame is a Catholic university.  They certainly aren't the only Catholic university but, in the world of College Football, they were the one that counted.  Just as Brigham Young has a "nationwide media market" made up of devoted Mormons which makes them an attractive option for a Pac 10 power grab that may be forthcoming now that the Commissioner seat is changing hands, Notre Dame has that same "nationwide media market" among Catholics.  And there are a great many more Catholics than Mormons.

The problem is that the number of Catholics in the United States is on the wane.  The Catholic church is not a growth area.  With the world becoming more secular,  and with the growth of megachurches and non-denominational churches, and with the scandals over gay priests and child molestation, the Catholic community has been taking its lumps lately.  Moreover, people are just less likely than they used to be to consider religion so important in their life as to pull for a school because of that affiliation.

Formerly, Notre Dame could count on a relatively large alumni base in percentage terms compared with other schools.  However, in the last 20 years or so, many schools have gotten very large.  And with that, they are adding to their alumni base at a much greater rate than Notre Dame.

You see, Notre Dame is not an exceptionally big school (enrollment around 11,000).  Every school in the SEC has a higher enrollment than Notre Dame but that wasn't always true.  Florida alone is nearly 4 times as large and Ohio State is close to 5 times as large.  This matters because alumni typically are lifelong, interested fans.  And when the living alumni base of Notre Dame is only around 120,000 worldwide and that base is only growing by about 2000 per year while being greatly outpaced by other schools, it means that the  alumni based fan support is not growing anywhere near as fast most of the other "big" schools.

Hollywood once was a big influence on the prestige of Notre Dame.  When movies were being made about Knute Rockne ("win one for the Gipper") and Rudy, Notre Dame was  in actuality and in portrayal one of the few pillars of College Football.  But you don't see that happening anymore and the golden age of movies (for those type of movies and others like them), regrettably, appears to be "gone with the wind."

I read another writer on bleacher report who was mocking the fact that ABC/ESPN still acts like Michigan vs. Notre in the Big House is the single biggest rivalry in the single greatest stadium.  This writer noted that it just isn't true anymore in either case.  There are lots of rivalries and lots of College Football stadiums that are near cathedrals in terms of sports architecture and in their size.

Another traditional strength of Notre Dame was that they were a large fish in what was then a much smaller pond.  College football has gotten BIG...really BIG.  In 1970, the Big East didn't even exist.  The SEC was still a 10 team league, the Big 12 had 8, the Big Ten had 10 (not 11), the Pac 10 was the Pac 8, etc.  Now there are 120 Division I schools.  While I'm not saying that a more recent addition such as University of South Florida, for example, is going to steal spotlight from Notre Dame directly, the collective effect of having so many more schools dilutes the top teams press dominance marginally.

The rampant rise of television has hurt Notre Dame as well.  While there are those that would argue that Notre Dame has a monopoly on NBC (more on that in a minute), the proliferation of College Football coverage has hurt Notre Dame's prominence.  When there was only 1 or 2 games per week broadcast nationally (back in the 60's and 70's and even early 80's), Notre Dame still got on tv several times per season where other teams didn't.  Now everyone is on every week unless they're playing directional U (Southeast Idaho, for example).  Notre Dame no longer enjoys a status as being the team that would be on tv where others were not.  They are simply one of a crowd now.

The NBC contract has hurt Notre Dame as well.  ABC and ESPN are the rulers of College Football.  They are where the eyeballs are on Saturdays during the regular season.  But Fox negotiated the BCS postseason away from ABC and now has those prestigious post-season games.  CBS is still a player because they responded by going and signing the biggest fish out there which is the contract to be the primary carrier of the SEC.

NBC is just not a prime destination for sports anymore.  They're down to 1 NFL game per week (just to say they're in the game on the biggest sport of them all), they've lost all bowl games, lost Major League Baseball, lost the NBA, and lost Nascar.  What they have left are the Olympics (which are only every 4 years and they highly overpay for those rights), golf, tennis (a dying sport in terms of interest within the U.S.), horse racing (a niche at best), and Notre Dame.  That's it.  Had NBC not needed Notre Dame so badly, they probably would not have renewed that contract because they aren't getting enough audience share out of it but they couldn't afford the PR hit of not having it given that it would have meant they only 1 game per week of only 1 of the big three sports that was left in their arsenal.

So in a nutshell, Notre Dame has, over the course of the last 25 years, gone from being the team that would be seen very often as the "game of the week" when only 1 or 2 games were nationally televised to the game on the network nobody's watching.  Yes, they're still on tv but so is everybody else.  The only advantage Notre Dame gets out of that particular contract is not having to share the revenues.

And here's some more miscellaneous fodder just to add to the fire.  Notre Dame is coming off their worst year in decades, the AD just left for Duke (of all places), and they're still suffering bad PR from the Willingham firing.  Urban Meyer had the choice to go to Notre Dame or Florida and chose Florida.  In today's pop-culture and instant gratification society, who can blame him?  It's so much easier to get athletic kids to come to sunny Florida than rural Indiana.  If Notre Dame isn't winning routinely, there's not much draw for an 18 year old to play football there.  He would have as good (and maybe a better) chance to make the pros from another school and be in an geographic area that is a lot more "youth" oriented.  There's a reason why Miami went on such a long run of talented athletes and Southern Cal is doing the same now.

So, am I painting a doomsday scenario for Notre Dame?  I don't believe they will fall off the map by any means but eventually they will have to succumb to some realities.  There will be some winning seasons and some highs along the way but, just like the newspapers, the trend is downward and troubling.  I believe that, if a visionary person with some political will were to take over as the AD, they would see that there are 2 probable outcomes here.  The first is that Notre Dame joins a conference while it still has a great deal of negotiation power.  The other is that they wait too long and lose their leverage and don't get as good of a deal when joining a conference.  For those that are truly fans of the program, the first is definitely preferred to the second.

Coming soon...why that conference affiliation should be the Big 10.  Thanks for reading.