(01-08-2018 12:03 PM)AllTideUp Wrote: Terry,
I don't think anyone's saying that Notre Dame is in a bad place right now. I think we're saying that ND is going to have to make some decisions in the future because the football prowess has been trending down for the last 3 decades.
At the end of the day, football drives the bus for any power program. For Notre Dame, they have sustained independence and foregone the benefits of conference membership because of the truly special football brand that they have, but no brand is 100% self-perpetuating.
The post Lou Holtz era has been up and down to say the least. National championship level teams haven't come nearly as often as they once did. In fact, the only time ND produced an undefeated team in recent years(2012) turned out to be an occasion where they were thoroughly outmatched on every level by their title game opponent. Now, we could write that off as an isolated incident because ND wouldn't be the first team Alabama has shown up in the past decade. What's more telling though is that ND hasn't really been in the hunt outside of that season.
We can't ignore that because as the world changes around ND, the Irish must compensate somehow to maintain their course.
This season was pretty good, but ND tapered off near the end and was dominated by a Miami team that looked anything but unbeatable during the season. Point being, ND's best years don't look like the best years of all the powers around them. Something has changed.
Now, it's entirely possible that ND under Brian Kelly is about to start running off great seasons, but the last 20 years or so wouldn't indicate that.
At some point, ND is going to have to do something to secure their economic future because right now the economics of it are pretty much the only thing sustaining ND's place in the world. In a sense, it's like you're a guy who spent a long life in the work force and is currently enjoying the fruits of retirement. Problem is that the bank account is getting low and the doctor just told you that you're going to live for another 80 years. If ND maintains good but not great status for another 20 years then things might start to look very different. All of a sudden, you're going to need history majors to figure out exactly where ND fell off the map.
Let's look at it like this...when did the day come when Notre Dame felt the need to sign a deal with a league like the ACC for 5 games a season?
Those of us on the outside looking in tend to marvel at how ND was able to swing a sweetheart deal like that, but we're actually looking at it in reverse. 30 or 40 years ago, that never would have happened. ND would not have in any way needed the ACC. What changed? When did the leverage shift?
Actually, I think that's a fine example of time marching on. ND is still powerful enough that they don't have to fully join a conference. They are no longer powerful enough, however, that they can be truly independent of any conference.
The great benefit of a good conference is that the total value outweighs the sum of the parts. As a collective, any good conference helps lift the sails of all its members. That's not just a matter of good competition. It's a matter of economics.
So right now, Notre Dame is fine because you're Notre Dame. What happens when Notre Dame isn't Notre Dame anymore?
Well, past history is just that. Past history. I thought that ND fans were the ones supposedly stuck in the past. :)
A rather small nit. ND hadn't been trending down for three decades, but only for 20 years (1993-2012). :)
It had a great run from 1988-93, but hadn't been the same since it forced out Lou Holtz and hired a series of mediocre coaches.
But, ND won 12 games in 2012 and 10 games each in 2015 and 2017. That didn't happen at all (double digit wins) between 1993-2012, except for 10 win seasons in 2002 and 2006.
Three double digit wins in 6 years and two in three years is a change in the right direction.
First, I think that the program is in much better shape today than at any time since 1993. Kelly has gone 69-34, recruited well and has brought much needed stability to the program in his eight years at the helm.
Certainly, he has been the best post-Holtz head coach, by a long shot. He is no Rockne or Ara, but much better than Davie, Willingham and Weis.
Second, I am pretty much convinced that the ND administration doesn't really want to do everything necessary to win a championship or really cares about winning national titles any longer. They don't want football to become too big again and, in their minds, overshadow academics.
They would certainly market the hell out of a national championship if the chips fell just right (like perhaps if in 2012 ND ended up playing Kansas State instead of Alabama?), but the administration doesn't really want to do whatever is necessary to compete with Alabama, Ohio State, etc....
The administration forced out Frank Leahy in 1953, Ara Parseghian in 1974 and Lou Holtz in 1996 over similar "overshadowing" concerns, so this is a fairly routine, cyclical thing at ND.
The current administration seems want to maintain 9-10 wins and hope/let the money keep coming in from the fans, NBC, Under Armour and donors. That seems to be the current goal to have a program that is good enough to be maybe top ten to fifteen, that seems to be the desired goal.
Otherwise, ND could lower academic standards for football players (often overstated, but clearly higher than NCAA standards) and could try to make a big splash by offering a big time coach $10 million a year.
They won't do either. They also will continue to kick kids out or suspend them for failing to meet internal ND academic standards (remember Julius Jones, for instance? He had to sit out the 2002 season because he didn't meet ND's standards but was NCAA eligible and would have played in many other places) and for things like having a girl in the dorms or hotel room after curfew (like they suspended RB Deon MacIntosh from the 2018 Citrus Bowl).
If that is the case (that ND won't go all out to win championships), and given that ND wants to be the national Catholic university, why worry about things like the playoffs and football conference membership?
They would rather schedule like they did this year, with trips to Boston, Miami and Palo Alto, than do what JR suggests.
His ideas are not what ND wants, not what they hope to accomplish, not their goals. To the administration, it is about more than just football.
In other words, "good but not great" is good enough for ND's administration. It drives ND football fans wild, but that seems to be the current landscape.
ND seems to have decided that the best way the football program can serve ND's internal (non-sports) goals is to continue to be a football independent indefinitely, come what may.
ND uses independence to attract students from all over the country. It thinks that the national exposure of its schedules helps in that regard.
That is why ND clings to indy status despite all of the perceived drawbacks from same that non-ND fans discuss on message boards.
So, it is really not even a football issue primarily when it comes to ND football scheduling. Brian Kelly is just (for now) the football coach. He has almost zero say about the football schedules.
I think that fans of other programs look at the ND situation all wrong, thinking that ND's administration thinks like other traditional programs do and will make decisions accordingly. It doesn't.
If ND wanted to make the most TV money (the main driver of conference realignment) then it would have simply joined the Big Ten. Instead, there was no chance of that. Likewise, ND could likely make more TV money by joining the ACC in full, but it isn't likely to do that, either.
ND isn't run like Alabama, Ohio State or Texas. It just isn't. It also often doesn't think the way that other programs do, as far as analyzing goals and methods.
ND was not interested in positioning itself to maximize its TV revenues. I know that is some kind of conference realignment heresy, but it is true.
Hell, it could have put its TV rights on the market for ESPN and others to bid, but did not bother to do that.
It just renewed with NBC instead, at a time (2013) of rising TV contracts by ESPN and Fox.
It sees the NBC contract merely as a means to an end, in that it "makes enough" TV money to keep ND football independent. That is the goal, independence by and for itself.
The TV money is just a way to accomplish and maintain that independence.
ND athletics fully funds all of its athletic programs/scholarships and still sends about millions every year to the academic side of the university:
"Notre Dame plans to continue using revenues from the contract to fund the school's financial-aid endowment for the general student body, not including athletes. The school said that since 1991, about 6,300 undergraduates have received nearly $80 million in aid from revenue generated through the NBC contract.
Notre Dame also uses NBC revenues to endow doctoral fellowships in its graduate school and MBA scholarships in its Mendoza College of Business."
http://www.espn.com/college-football/sto...-deal-2025
It could keep that profit within the athletic department but doesn't think that way.
That is my long winded version of saying that the ND administration actually likes where its athletic programs are right now and doesn't see any problems like other fans on the outside might think.