Irish, ACC ties could lead to longer alliance

The bigger news this week than an ACC schedule that probably won’t be played anyway was the revelation Notre Dame isn’t quite as committed to football independence as some of its donors might have liked.

It took a pandemic, but the Fighting Irish came running to the arms of the ACC when the time came.

Notre Dame’s temporary induction as the ACC’s 15th team in football may be temporary but like the first lunge down any slippery slope, the possible has become the inevitable. Most insiders thought it would take Notre Dame getting left out of the College Football Playoff to make full ACC membership palatable. No one saw this exigency coming, but now that Notre Dame has crossed this line once, the line will be more easily crossed again.

The expiration of Notre Dame’s deal with NBC in 2025 was expected to be the next inflection point for potential ACC membership, but it turns out that money is easily shared with the rest of the league, if that is the only way for Notre Dame to play a full football schedule. Problem solved!

There’s no question this is a short-term deal, but despite Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick’s protestations, it has long-term implications.

The ACC’s Board of Directors gets credit for driving a hard bargain with Notre Dame, which has largely been able to dictate terms of its liking to the ACC since coming aboard in 2013. ACC Commissioner John Swofford has twice won subtle victories in negotiations with the Irish with lasting impact: This one, making the most of the ACC’s leverage, and the implication of Notre Dame’s half-membership that ensured Notre Dame could only join the ACC until the ACC’s grant-of-rights agreement expires in 2036.

Which isn’t to say the ACC hasn’t benefited from Notre Dame’s presence. It has, thanks in large part to the immediate success of the men’s and women’s basketball programs, and having access to Notre Dame football inventory was a major factor in the successful launch of the ACC Network. But getting Notre Dame fully into the ACC’s embrace has always been the endgame.

Now that Notre Dame’s had a taste of this — of having a schedule assigned to it, rather than sewn from whole cloth — it’s always going to be easier to come back for more. And it isn’t the hardship some Irish fans might claim. In normal years, Notre Dame can still play Navy, Michigan or Michigan State and Stanford or USC. It already went to a four-year home-and-home cycle with the two Big Ten schools to accommodate its five or six ACC games, so it would not be a big deal to do the same with the California schools.

The ACC can ensure Notre Dame plays Boston College every year and there are other ACC games that have made sense to Fighting Irish fans.

Those books get even easier to cook if the ACC abandons the Atlantic and Coastal divisions, as it has by necessity this season, another slippery slope.

Until this pandemic, Notre Dame’s eventual full membership in the ACC was still a matter of if. It was going to take some external contingency to make it a matter of when. We have arrived at that point. It is now a matter of when.