Quote Originally Posted by Tailgate Guru View Post
One of the flaws in the Notre Dame-Big East arrangement was that Notre Dame "agreed" to schedule some Big East opponents in football but was very selective about the opponent and, to some extent, the venue. Consequently, Notre Dame basically went about its "normal" business, playing Pitt regularly home and away as it has done off and on for years (and BC before BC joined the ACC), and scattering most of the other games among the northeastern schools - Syracuse, Rutgers and UConn, sometimes playing the "road" game in neutral venues. Notre Dame wouldn't play Louisville or Cincinnati or West Virginia, which have all been the Big East's best television draws since the 2004 expansion. (The 2 for 1 ND played with WVU in 1997, 2000 and 2001 was something scheduled early in the Big East's existence, perhaps before ND joined the Big East in the mid-1990s.)

If Notre Dame selectively joins the ACC with a limited football schedule, the hypothetical six games against ACC opponents should not be a glut of Boston College, Pitt, Syracuse, Georgia Tech, Miami and Florida State (i.e., schools with which Notre Dame has some history or geographic interests). If have no problem if one or maybe two of the six games are annual, every-year events. It makes sense for BC and Notre Dame to play regularly, at least at first. And it makes sense for two or three games to be against the ACC's marquee football schools (FSU, Miami, VT and Clemson) on some sort of rotating basis; after all, this is all about making money (i.e., television appearances). And I think it could be okay if one of ND's ACC games is played in a neutral venue each year (Chicago, DC, NYC, Charlotte, Atlanta, Florida). But there needs to be some guarantee that every ACC school will have, at minimum, a home-and-home with the Irish at least once every six or eight years, whatever the math would work out to be.
I definitely agree with this. People have asserted that we are thinking about entering an arrangement like ND had with the Big East. They would be correct if ND retains control over their ACC schedule and only played, say, 3 games with ACC opponents. But a balanced, 6 annual game home-and-home schedule is entirely different. It would be nice if Duke came off the rotation voluntarily, however, to decrease the number of garbage games nominally.