Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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UPON FURTHER REVIEW TODD D. BURLAGE Wanted: New Home, Better Starts Be it in print, on the radio or just in daily conversation, I admit to never getting overly excited about this latest football season. A disappointing 0-2 start with losses to South Florida and Michigan, followed by the deflating loss to USC a few weeks later, spoiled my high hopes for this season on two different occasions and left me rather uninspired. Like each of the last three head coaches at Notre Dame, second-year skipper Brian Kelly has provided us with both brilliant and baffling moments so far, while teasing us at the same time with equal parts hope and despair. The issues that cost Notre Dame any chance at a magical season were obvious. Quarterback play needs to improve, red-zone trips need to be maximized and the special teams need to provide more consistency than a couple of exciting kickoff returns from standout George Atkinson III. Those areas of improvement fall on the coaching staff. But two unrelated and broader issues at Notre Dame — one on and one off the field — also need to be addressed if this team is going to quit treading water and become more than just a program that was really good under Lou Holtz 20-some years ago. OVERRATED INDEPENDENCE This won't necessarily be a popular opinion, and the idea wouldn't even be implemented until the lucrative television contract with NBC expires after the 2015 season, but the time has come for Notre Dame to join a confer- ence in all of its sports, and there is a perfect fit out there. Unfortunately, the Big East is im- ploding right before our eyes and Notre Dame deserves better than playing in a league made up of Confer- ence USA outcasts and realignment orphans from around the country. The expanding Atlantic Coast Conference offers the perfect opportunity for all Irish sports, including football. The soon to be 14-team ACC is made up of some of the finest academic in- stitutions in the country with Duke, Wake Forest, Boston College, Virginia and North Carolina, among others. The ACC has four private schools with Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly has held his teams together at Notre Dame after tough starts, but the Irish will need to get out of the chute faster in the future. Duke, Wake Forest, Miami and Boston College. Syracuse will become the fifth when it flees the Big East and heads south in the near future. So from an academic performance and mission profile, membership would do nothing to diminish the Notre Dame name. And in terms of the 20 Notre Dame athletic programs outside of football, there is no better fit in the country for those than the ACC. The men's and women's basketball leagues in the ACC are soon to become the best in the country when the Big East dis- solves, and sports such as lacrosse and soccer offer the student-athletes from some of Notre Dame's top athletic pro- grams a chance to regularly compete against the best in the country. ACC football is solid with regular powers such as Miami, Virginia Tech, Clemson and Florida State. Pittsburgh will also help to bolster the football profile when it comes on board. And while the level of football competition is strong and improving in the ACC, it is not to the level where Notre Dame will ever get swallowed up, creating the opportunity for the Irish to be- come a regular participant in the ACC championship game and in the BCS. The Irish played ACC members Boston College, Maryland and Wake For- est this season, and beat all three. When speculating about Notre Dame ditching independence and joining a conference, the Big Ten al- ways gets mentioned because of its obvious geographical advantages. But regionalized" is a dirty word around Notre Dame and, again, the ACC would offer the Irish programs a re- cruiting bed that would stretch all the way down the eastern seaboard from Boston to Miami. Football independence has been good to Notre Dame, but all good things must come to an end, and the ACC would provide all the Irish stu- dent-athletes great stability and secu- rity during a period of unprecedented turbulence in college sports. JUMP STARTS A new conference won't help any championship aspirations — at least the national kind — if Kelly can't figure out how to get his teams to play better out of the gate. The losses to South Florida and Michigan again illustrated some of the early-season struggles Kelly has suffered as a Division I coach. To Kelly's credit, in his two seasons at Notre Dame he has been terrific at pulling his teams together through the lowest points. Kelly started 1-3 in 2010 and battled back to an 8-5 record with an impressive win over Miami in the Sun Bowl. After that miserable 0-2 start to this season, the Irish never showed any panic, rebounded with a 31-13 win over Big Ten championship hopeful Michigan State and cruised to bowl eligibility — but only after the longer-term damage had been done. In Kelly's eight seasons as a Division I head coach, his teams are only 19-14 in games before October. The losses in the first two games of the season speak to the need for Kelly to find a way to get his guys to play with the same urgency in September as they do in October and especially November. Fighting an uphill battle and trying to overcome tough starts every sea- son is no recipe for longevity at Notre Dame, conference or no conference. ✦ Todd D. Burlage has been a writer for Blue & Gold Illustrated since July 2005. He can be reached at tburlage@blueandgold.com