WAAAAHHHHHH!!!! - We're Notre Dame
- Fred
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
This will be a very short article, mostly for my edification.
This was the AP Top 25 in College Football Poll after the end of the regular season.
After the season ended, the Miami Hurricanes and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish finished with the same record with very similar credentials for the college football playoffs.
As in any sport, there are tie-breaker rules for evenly matched teams.
So when push came to shove for the last at-large playoff spot, the committee chose the Miami Hurricanes based on their head-to-head result with Notre Dame on August 31, 2025, when Miami won 27-24. To me, that is more than a fair tie-breaker.
Within a day of the decision, Notre Dame went off on a caterwauling rage, they were going to leave the ACC! Did they?
Editor's Note: Not yet.
Miami then went on to the National Championship game, making the Irish look like even bigger babies.
And, to top it off, the worst case scenario played out for the Notre Dame administration. The Indiana-Miami Final showed that Notre Dame:
Wasn't the Best Team in the ACC
Wasn't even the Best Team in Indiana
Indiana was one of the losingest college football programs in history until the 2023 season. Now, in 2026, they are the National Champions.
Notre Dame used to think that they were bigger than the game of college football, from its earliest Knute Rockne days to its exclusive NBC Television Contract.
Not anymore.
Your question is: Why don't they join a conference? Easy, they don't like to share. Geographically, they should have joined the Big 10 in 1990 when Penn State joined, but they didn't.
Ironically, Notre Dame joined the Big 10 Conference.... in hockey. Here's the hockey standings as of this morning.
So, as of right now, Notre Dame is in the Big 10 for hockey, the ACC for most other sports, and a part-time member of the ACC for football?
Listen, Notre Dame already has a competitive advantage in recruiting. In most states, the best football teams are from the Catholic Schools. As a private institution, if Notre Dame only recruited from Catholic Schools in America, they'd still be one of the best programs in the country, they thrive on national recruiting. Only 9 of Notre Dame's 105 scholarships in 2025 went to Indiana residents. They already enjoy a pipeline that few schools can replicate by recruiting based off of "mystique."
The Big 10 and the SEC are now strong enough, in football, to squeeze out any remnants of football independents.
Ironically, Notre Dame and Miami had nearly the same record in football in 1980, too. Now Tennessee St., they dropped down to I-AA that next year, but you'll notice nearly the rest of the teams joined conferences. That NBC Contract is up in 2029, if the Fighting Irish roll out a couple of 8-4 seasons, that contract will be in real jeopardy.
Did we even mention the coach's assault charges? We did not.
Did we even mention that the coach pulled the team out of their bowl game this season? We did not.
You say that the conferences are too strong and you respect Notre Dame's independent spirit? Back in the 80's Notre Dame manipulated their schedule so they played the toughest teams in the nation, no matter what the conference. Notre Dame's 1988 Championship is often considered the hardest schedule in the modern history of college football.
2025's team? Their schedule was the 34th hardest in the nation, the same as (part-time) fellow ACC'er Duke.
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