College Football: Of Course the BCS Discussion Should Include Notre Dame

The BCS meetings have been taking place this week and as Mike Felder pointed out, Notre Dame is not only in the building but doing pretty well for itself. The proposal for only conference champions to participate in a four-team playoff is a non-starter, which is good news for independent football programs.

Now, it's natural for some fans to wonder, well, just why the heck Notre Dame is so prominently involved in the proceedings considering the Fighting Irish haven't been serious contenders on the national scale in about a couple decades. Their last BCS-level bowl win? 1991. Since then, it's been a cavalcade of coaching failures and even Brian Kelly hasn't figured out how to lose fewer than five games in a season in Notre Dame.

So what's Notre Dame doing at these discussions?

This inclusion of Notre Dame in the debate isn't because the program is so very special, it's because Notre Dame is an FBS football program that, like everyone else, has the theoretical capability of going undefeated.

And what people have hammered the BCS for the most, all the way back to when it was called the "Bowl Coalition" and the Big Ten and PAC-10 weren't participating in order to protect the Rose Bowl, was its lack of inclusiveness and failure to properly account for a scenario when a non-BCS school was deserving of a shot at the title.

You thought Boise State in 2009 and Utah in 2008 were able to raise a stink after they were denied national title eligibility when they went undefeated? Watch what happens when you're deemed anti-Papist by the Catholic League for telling ND what to do lest they suffer the same fate. I exaggerate, but not by much.

Also, if this plan had come out 25 years ago, Notre Dame's insistence on independent inclusion would have been both normal and shared by Penn State, Syracuse, Florida State, Miami, West Virginia, Clemson and the host of other independent football programs at the time.

Yes, the vast majority of those independent programs have since joined conferences, but strong-arming Notre Dame into joining them is not the type of thing college football ought to be spending its time and resources on.

The message is clear: Notre Dame should in on the BCS discussions. If you're so certain the Fighting Irish won't ever be good enough to compete for a national title again, then whatever stipulations Notre Dame comes up with won't be relevant anyway. And if they do someday run the table again, the BCS owes it to college football to account for that and let the Irish play.