Could Notre Dame And The ACC Go With A Pod Schedule In 2020?

We don’t know if there will be college football in 2020, and we are even less certain of what the Notre Dame football schedule will look like should there be a season. What we do know is that as it stands right now, Notre Dame only has nine games on its docket after USC, Stanford and Wisconsin all came off the schedule when their conferences decided to play only league only games in 2020.

There’s a chance more leagues could make a similar decision, which would further complicate Notre Dame’s football schedule. As we’ve discussed several times in recent weeks, the odds are strong that the ACC will work with Notre Dame to ensure the Irish have a full schedule this fall.

One proposal would create quite an interesting schedule.

According to David Teel of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, one proposal being considered by the ACC is Notre Dame joining the league for just one season. At that point the league would break into three “geographic pods” of five teams.

Each team would play the four other teams in their pods twice, which would give them eight games each. Team would add two more games by having crossover games with the SEC.

There were three pod proposals in Teel’s article. In options one and two he had Notre Dame in a pod with Syracuse, Boston College, Pittsburgh and Louisville.

In option three he had the Irish in a pod with Syracuse, Boston College, Pittsburgh and Virginia Tech. This final pod would make little sense if the pods are meant to be geographic. How do you not have Virginia and Virginia Tech, who are less than two and a half hours away from each other, not in the same pod?

Another option, according to Teel, is to keep the divisions as they currently are and having just six league games. Which he says would create “more flexibility with the remainder of the schedule and still preserving the ACC-SEC dates.”

Clearly this would not be an ideal situation for Notre Dame, but at least it would allow them to have some semblance of a season.

Based on Notre Dame’s currently schedule, it would make sense for the Irish to keep Arkansas on the schedule and then play the eight pod games.

Based on the first two options, Notre Dame’s schedule would like something like this.

Pittsburgh (Home)
Pittsburgh (Away)

Syracuse (Home)
Syracuse (Away)

Boston College (Home)
Boston College (Away)

Louisville (Home)
Louisville (Away)

Arkansas (Home)
Undetermined game (Away)

At the end of the day I have a hard time seeing this being the way the leagues would go. What will be interesting to see is how many games do these leagues ultimately play in a conference-only set up. It would make sense to still play at least 10 games, but right now there are far more questions than answers about what will happen, and how things shake out as more decisions are made.

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