While the college football world waits to see how the University of Notre Dame responds to the engorgement of the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference, I have a suggestion for Notre Dame athletic director John Swarbrick, President John Jenkins and the university’s board of directors: Form a new and formidable football conference on principles other than money.
Call it the Integrity Continental Football Conference and invite only schools with a reputation for high academic standards and enforcement of those standards. For example, no universities that offer athletes majors like athletic marketing and administration would be included.
Forming a new conference would mean enticing schools away from several existing athletic conferences, including the two new behemoths. That would not be easy, but Notre Dame is the only university with the national reputation, following and appeal to pull it off.
Here’s an initial list of target schools:
Northwestern University from the Midwest.
Boston College from the Northeast.
United States Naval Academy from the East.
Wake Forest University and the University of Virginia from the South.
Brigham Young University from the Mountain States.
Stanford University from the West Coast.
The University of Pittsburgh, the University of North Carolina, Georgia Tech and the University of California at Berkley are other possibilities. But one of the keys for success would be to limit conference membership to eight schools, which would allow each of them to play some teams from the two supersized proto-professional athletic conferences.
Would such a move cost Notre Dame its cherished football independence? Not necessarily. Through its current athletic arrangement with the Atlantic Coast Conference, under which all of the university’s other sports teams compete in the ACC, that independence is already qualified. Moreover, the Irish routinely play the teams on my projected list — and in the cases of Navy and Stanford, every year.
The proposed league would fall somewhere between the Ivy League and the preprofessional superconferences. Like the former, the league would require athletes to demonstrate strong academic performance. Like the latter, it would seek to recruit the most promising high school athletes, including those intent on a professional career, by promising them high-caliber football competition and a chance at a national championship.
At the moment, it appears that Notre Dame is in the enviable position of having both superconferences as suitors, with the Big Ten (soon to be the Big Fourteen) holding the inside track. One reason for that is history: The Irish already have long-standing rivalries with Big Ten schools, especially Michigan, Michigan State and Purdue. And its location in the center of the Midwest makes the Big Ten a natural fit.
But the real temptation to join the Big Ten is money. The superconference is expected to command more than $1 billion for the right to televise its football games, with an annual payout to each member school projected at around $65 million.
On the other hand, Notre Dame is reportedly seeking to up its contract with NBC to a bulbous $75 million a year for the rights to broadcast its football games. That would allow the Irish to remain an independent football power.
But thread throughout all this is an “X” factor: The College Football Playoffs. Will the playoffs expand from four to eight teams? If so, how many at-large spots would be allowed for an independent team like Notre Dame?
These are real economic issues for a team with no league title to aim for and for a school where football revenue supports the rest of its intercollegiate sports programs. But I would hope that in the end, they are not the decisive ones.
Notre Dame is indeed in an enviable position, and I hope the university puts it to good use. With the opportunity to model what a collegiate athletic league should be, Notre Dame has a chance to buck the tide that has now produced two outsize football conferences with no purpose or logic other than making more money off of preprofessional athletes, too many of whom walk away from school with a college degree that masks the lack of real education.
Notre Dame has always presented itself as higher-minded about collegiate sports than its competition. Here’s a chance to prove it.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Kenneth Woodward, a former religion editor for Newsweek, is writer-in-residence at the Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago.
