But ACC football is better off with this deal than usual. The Irish established their VAC collective agreement in football out of necessity. A whole generation of fans has grown up not understanding why we make so much noise around the Irish. Notre Dame hasn`t won a national championship since 1988, the longest drought in the school`s history, and has only twice made it to the top five in this century. The Irish entered the BCS title game in 2012 and 2018 in the college football playoffs. They lost those games with a combined 72-17, another way of saying the same thing about Notre Dame`s demise from the elite. Today, the most comprehensive method of knowing who is part of college football`s elite is a map of the South. It`s also remarkable that this move not only stabilizes Notre Dame`s football plan for 2020 in a conference-driven world, where they could have been totally excluded (the most important part of this picture), but could also generate financial gain for the Irish. For them, a total share of ACC TV`s revenue is better than its own deal with NBC.
According to an article by ESPN`s David M. Hale and Dave Wilson earlier this month, CCA paid at least $27 million per institution in normal distributions per school in the 2018-19 fiscal year, with an average of about $US 29 million per school. Meanwhile, Notre Dame received about $7 million from the ACC for its non-membership in the league, and their soccer contract with NBC (which runs until 2025) would be worth about $15 million a year, and they receive an additional $3.19 million a year from the college football playoffs (regardless of whether they`re selected; they weren`t in 2019-20, but they were in 2018-19). So that indicates they received a total of about $25.2 million last year (plus what they received from the Big Ten as an associate member for hockey). The impact of the five-game deal on Notre Dame`s football plan remains to be seen, but it most likely means that in the future, the Irish won`t play as many Midwestern opponents. USC, Stanford and Navy will likely all remain on Notre Dame`s schedule, and the Irish will be forced to play Arizona State at Cowboys Stadium next year. Notre Dame already had an appointment contract with the ACC, which each year puts five or six games with the League on the Fighting Irish`s schedule. They had six this season: Clemson, Duke, Wake Forest, Georgia Tech, Louisville and Pitt.
Added to this are home games against Florida State and Syracuse, as well as street games against North Carolina and Boston College. There will be no renewal of the rivalry between Notre Dame and Miami. Notre Dame and Michigan were planning a two-year hiatus in 2018 and 2019, and the two schools never officially signed a notified agreement that would require them to play against one another by 2030. It`s possible that Notre Dame will use the ACC to take Michigan out of its football program, along with Michigan State and Purdue. Would it be “good” to leave Notre Dame football in the cold for a year? Of course. But the conference sees them as partners for everything else, which replaces wickedness. On Wednesday, a deluge of anti-Notre Dame vibes erupted among VAC school fans. At that time, it was announced that the ACC would allow Notre Dame to be a one-year football conference member due to the coronavirus-induced national fiasco.