Let the continued trek from the Big East continue. While the conference has a new commissioner and many new members, there’s no doubt that the Big East has been well on its way to being a college football also-ran for years now, and that’s only getting worse as the talent bleed is spreading to other sports. Notre Dame will be leaving the Big East for the ACC. Granted, the move won’t take place for another 27 months and will cost the Irish $5 million dollars, but that’s nothing in the grand scheme of things.
The interesting wrinkle, as always, concerns Notre Dame’s football teams. While the Fighting Irish will take their sports to the Atlantic Coast Conference, their football team will remain an independent, at least in name. The weird thing is the fact that the Irish are severely altering their football schedule to fit in better with the ACC without joining said ACC. Once the conference switch takes place, Notre Dame’s football team will play 5 ACC games and will earn bowl affiliation with the ACC’s non-BCS bowl games. All this while maintaining its traditional rivalries with teams like USC, Navy, and Michigan while still entertaining more recent rivals like fellow ACC team the Miami Hurricanes and natural rivals like BYU.
The big move here is the basketball one. Notre Dame, a traditional Big East powerhouse, will be heading to the second-toughest basketball conference in the country (from the toughest). Swapping out Georgetown and Louisville for Duke, North Carolina, and NC State is… well, not tougher, but definitely as tough and completely different from the grinding Big East conference season.
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