Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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Murphy’s Law The Conference Keystone By Dan Murphy Frank Leahy started his second year as Notre Dame’s head coach with a change that makes any modern day tradition-bucking head coach seem tame. In 1942, Leahy did away with the box formation in the Irish backfield. The same box formation drawn up by Knute Rockne and used for two decades and three national titles in South Bend. Leahy’s change wasn’t well received. It didn’t help that his team started that season with a tie and a loss. The following year Notre Dame won a national championship. Then it won three more and four Heisman trophies, and ushered in a stretch of unparalleled success for the storied program during the next decade. Thus began, or at least pinpointed, Notre Dame’s greatest tradition: thinking outside the box. From offensive alignments to television contracts to conference partnerships, Notre Dame has a history of charting an original course through NCAA norms. The path the Irish choose, if not trailblazing, usually at least sends ripples through the rest of the country. Its newest sweetheart deal with the Atlantic Coast Conference is no different. When Notre Dame slipped away from the group television rights of the College Football Association, it was greeted with a lot more hostility than the few public scoffs it’s heard this week amid a chorus of backslapping, head-shaking congratulations. The Irish looked selfish then for signing their own exclusive contract with NBC. In less than a decade, the rest of college football had followed Notre Dame’s lead and uncorked a flow of money into the sport that, for better or worse, has been picking up steam ever since. Former Irish athletics director Dick Rosenthal said most of the discussion while brokering that deal focused on its implications for college football as a whole. Jack Swarbrick, Notre Dame’s current athletics director, also had an eye on the broader picture while orchestrating his department’s move to the ACC and its new football ties to the conference during the past three months. Notre Dame’s unorthodox straddle between independence and the ACC is thinking outside the box. It may have fallen far enough in a sideways direction to keep from tipping over the next domino. Most conference affiliation shifts in recent history have set off a string of reactionary moves while affected parties clamor for a seat. There’s a good chance that Notre Dame, which mostly stood and watched as the dust settled during the past few years, will have the opposite effect. “I think this gives us a real chance that we are going to have a period ahead of us now in college athletics which is going to be pretty stable,” Swarbrick said. “That would be one of the nicest possible legacies if five years from now we look back on this deal and say, you know what, that ushered in a period where we focused on what was going on on the field and not what was going on in the AD’s office in college sports, and I think it will.” So how did Swarbrick and ACC commissioner John Swofford slip a ballast into the shaky conference structure of college sports? The $50 million buyout clause — 10 times larger than what the Irish are obligated to pay to leave the Big East — Swofford and the ACC council of presidents agreed to this week provides plenty of incentive for its 15 members to stay put. Swofford also sternly noted that the ACC wouldn’t be poaching any more Big East teams, or any other conference for that matter, to get an even 16 members. That should at least temporarily allow the reeling Big East to stop playing defense and plugging gaps with teams from coast to coast. The Big Ten and Big 12 seem content to be misnomers with their 12 and 10 teams, respectively, for now. Either would have gladly added the Irish and then went looking for another team, setting off the typical domino effect. The Pac-12 wouldn’t mind adding another pair of teams, but it is more likely to hoist a lower level western school to its ranks than snag someone from the fellow power conferences who are building stronger walls. The Irish were a coveted catch in the two-plus years of conference flip-flopping. Now that they’re locked into a new home, with football independence firmly in hand, the carousel is ready to stop spinning. Swarbrick and Swofford can’t take full credit for that. But once again Notre Dame’s ability to find a solution for its unique problems has provided a road map for college football’s immediate future. Dan Murphy has been a writer for Blue & Gold Illustrated since August 2011. He can be reached atdmurphy@blueandgold.com