BCS Changes, Super Conferences, and Notre Dame

In my article "The Parable of Notre Dame and the Big Ten," http://bleacherreport.com/articles/403545-the-parable-of-notre-dame-and-the-big-ten ,  I quote from a FanHouse article in which a source says that the Big Ten is acting to force Notre Dame into that conference by destroying the existing college landscape, leading to a movement toward perhaps 4 remaining 'super-conferences' of 16 members each.

Those four are assumed by most to be the Big Ten, the SEC, the Pac 16, and the ACC.

Notre Dame would be forced into joining the Big Ten in such a scenario, and according to the Big Ten fans who love the thought, because 16 member leagues would mean the Irish would have fewer options to schedule in such a way that will be attractive to NBC and TV viewers.

I likened that to the Big Ten arranging matters, destroying anything in its path, so that a Mafia-like offer that can't be refused is made to Notre Dame.

And now I believe that such a plan is father along than even I knew.

I just learned from my Texas Longhorn friend that a key reason UT will prefer a 16 member Pacific, or Big Ten or SEC, over any form of the Big 12 minus Nebraska is that those two leagues are prepared to demand that the BCS arrangements be re-drawn. 

They are going to demand that a conference rated as Automatic Qualifier that has at least 14 members be given two automatic bids to BCS bowls and be allowed three teams in BCS bowls if the third meets certain standards.

That will remove the final obstacle to any conference expanding beyond 12 members. Now, there is no post-season benefit to become larger than 12. With such new rules, a league will benefit by expanding to 14 or 16, if it is one of the 4 that most people now expect to survive as BCS AQ conferences. 

But will that 'force' Notre Dame to join the Big Ten? 

There are two ways to answer that question. The first is to note that leagues expanding to 16 will not make it significantly harder for Notre Dame to schedule quality members of BCS AQ conferences, unless those conferences play 10-game league schedules, leaving each school only two out-of-conference games.

That means it is impossible now to know how hard it would be for an independent Notre Dame to schedule if the landscape becomes one of four major conferences with 14-16 members each.

For example, if a 16 member Big Ten plays 10 conference games, it will be extremely difficult for Notre Dame to play more than one, Big Ten school per season. But if expanded versions of the ACC, SEC, and Pacific only play nine conference games, ND will have more wiggle room to schedule schools in those conferences.

Here is the hard fact: if 4 14-16 member super-conferences means that an independent Notre Dame is highly unlikely to be able to schedule more than seven or eight schools in the BCS AQ leagues in any season, then Notre Dame could, and probably would, suffer, in the polls and recruiting, from weak schedules.

That would seem to suggest that the answer to the above question is: YES, the Big Ten moves, and those of its Rose Bowl ally Pac 10, to devastate the current conferences landscape and replace it with four super-conferences probably does force Notre Dame to join a conference for all sports.

But that does not mean that Notre Dame has to join the Big Ten.

When Notre Dame realized that its best interests were to join a conference for basketball, it turned to the east, the Big East. Considering the large number of Notre Dame 'subway alum' fans in the northeast, from DC to Boston, and Notre Dame's need to recruit that region well, that move made perfect sense. 

It made perfect sense in another way as well: the Big East, for basketball, has always been a conference defined by private schools.

The Big Ten is the conference most truly defined by the largest possible land grant schools.

The addition of Nebraska only cements that identification, as does the Big Ten interest in Missouri, Rutgers, Texas, and Texas A&M. Notre Dame is a small private school, considerably smaller than the Big Ten's only private school, Northwestern. 

If Notre Dame feels its best interests are to join a conference for all sports, then it should look past the Big Ten tramping down the landscape in an attempt to force Notre Dame's hand, to the ACC.

The ACC is the only BCS league now with multiple private schools, and it will be the 'eastern' super-conference if only four survive as BCS AQ leagues.

Private school Syracuse and Notre Dame rival Pitt probably would be the top two Big East football schools the ACC would want if it were expanding to 14 or 16. 

As an ACC member, Notre Dame rivalries with private school Miami and Jesuit school BC would become almost as important to the national football calendar as Notre Dame versus Southern Cal.

If the plan being worked by the Big Ten comes to fruition, Notre Dame will have two choices: join the conference that created havoc to attempt to force Notre Dame to join it, or join the ACC.

The last time Notre Dame had to think out of the box, looking eastward rather than playing to the tune piped by the Big Ten, it became the Notre Dame of mystique.