How Notre Dame Puts Together A 2020 Schedule With Conference Plus-One Scenarios
The majority of college football presidents and athletic directors have been optimistic about there being college football in the fall, but what that will look like remains a significant question.
Will the season ultimately be played as is, or will teams and conferences need to make changes to who and where they play, which means an adjustment to the current schedule?
Those decisions will have an impact on Notre Dame’s schedule, but barring school’s going to a conference only schedule the odds are quite good that Notre Dame will end up being just fine, even if it must make some adjustments to its current schedule.
Sports Illustrated senior writer Pat Forde addressed this issue in a recent column. It’s a thorough analysis and I’d encourage you to give it a read.
The possibility of a conference only schedule is definitely on the table.
“I think it's a very real possibility," Swarbrick told Forde and Ross Dellenger. "There is support for a conference only plus-one [non-conference game]. If that's the model, we'd be fine, because [Notre Dame] would be most people's plus-one.”
The conference plus-one would be the most likely scenario if in fact the regular season is impacted by the reactions to the COVID-19 panic.
If that is the case, Notre Dame would be just fine, and Forde acknowledged that.
“Where would such a scheduling crunch leave the small Catholic college in northwest Indiana, which has been proudly (some might say arrogantly) conference-free in football for the entirety of its 131 seasons playing the sport?,” Forde wrote.
“Probably OK. But potentially in trouble. Those are the two most likely answers at this still-early, still-uncertain date.”
The only thing that would put Notre Dame in any kind of trouble is a conference-only slate, but even the odds are strong the Irish would fill a 12-game slate. Let’s take a look at both scenarios.
CONFERENCE ONLY PLUS-ONE - OPTION 1
Let’s grant five assumptions that Forde mentioned as likely or possible in his column, just to make it interesting.
1) Notre Dame and Navy will play
2) Arkansas will understandably choose to keep Louisiana-Monroe or Charleston Southern on the schedule as their plus-one instead of traveling to South Bend and taking a L.
3) Whether they be political reasons, financial reasons or the Pac 12 doing what it usually does and making a really dumb decision and being the only league to go conference only, Notre Dame doesn’t play Stanford or USC.
4) Wisconsin will keep its neutral site game against Notre Dame, which makes sense for the Badgers on the field (marquee matchup), from a travel standpoint (game is just over two hours away from campus) and from a financial standpoint (it’s essentially a split-revenue road game for Wisconsin).
5) Western Michigan will keep Notre Dame as its plus-one due to the big payout, which is something all schools must consider in these financially strapped times.
Let’s also really get interesting and say that Clemson decides to drop Notre Dame, with the ACC’s blessing, in order to keep its traditional rivalry with South Carolina as its plus-one. Let’s do the same thing with Louisville, who prefers to play a home game against rival Kentucky than travel to Notre Dame.
Let’s also say that Georgia Tech decides to keep its matchup against Notre Dame, which means it will not play its long-time rival Georgia. Financially this makes sense for the Yellow Jackets, who would likely make far more revenue from a home game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium than they would a road game at Georgia.
So that means Notre Dame has lost five games from its schedule and locked in four.
Where do the other eight games come from?
There is little to no chance the ACC will risk losing its long-term partnership with Notre Dame, and the decision makers at Notre Dame would certainly be wise to wield whatever power they can to get out of their football contract with the ACC should the school fail to meet its standard of providing Notre Dame with at least five opponents each season.
The good news for Notre Dame is the traditional rival for most of the ACC programs is a fellow in-conference program. With that in mind, there would be no reason for Duke to come off the schedule, same with Wake Forest and Pittsburgh.
That’s three more games on the schedule, raising the total to seven games, with four ACC games.
Notre Dame and the ACC would then work out a situation where at least one more conference team travels to South Bend for a road game this season. This move would give Notre Dame its five ACC games and would raise its season total to eight games.
Notre Dame would then need to add four more games to its 2020 schedule.
What often gets forgotten in this conversation is that Notre Dame is not the only Independent program in the country, and all five of the other Independent programs would be in the same boat, and all of them would jump at the chance to get a Notre Dame Stadium pay day.
This would be a great time for Notre Dame to finally honor the road game it owes BYU, which would give Notre Dame a ninth game and give it a full slate of road/neutral site games.
Notre Dame could then easily add Army and Liberty to its home schedule.
The Irish would then be at 11 games, with five true home games. Notre Dame could get UMass or New Mexico State to travel to South Bend should it fail to add another game, but Notre Dame should then put calls into local Big Ten programs Purdue, Indiana, Northwestern, Michigan State and Illinois in that order in an attempt to get another Power 5 game.
Purdue has a road contest against Boston College, and it would make a lot of financial sense for the Boilermakers and Eagles to drop that game, making it easy for Purdue to schedule Notre Dame.
Purdue would then get a bigger payday to come to Notre Dame and would save a significant amount of additional money by driving to South Bend (two hour drive) instead of flying to Boston.
So there you have it. Notre Dame’s 2020 football schedule:
Home Games
Purdue
Boston College
Duke
Army
Western Michigan
Liberty
Away/Neutral Games
Wisconsin
Pittsburgh
Wake Forest
Navy
Georgia Tech
BYU
It's not the sexiest schedule, and Notre Dame would likely do everything possible to add a marquee game to its home schedule, but that would be challenging.
Most top programs aren't going to want to use their one non-conference game to travel to South Bend, and home games are what Notre Dame needs.
Should Clemson or Louisville decide to keep their contest against Notre Dame, or if the ACC mandated they do that, it would make things much easier. You could eliminate the Big Ten game and either Army or Liberty, which would make the schedule far more impressive, especially the home schedule.
CONFERENCE ONLY PLUS-ONE - OPTION TWO
Another option would be for Notre Dame and the ACC to agree to double up their games this season.
ACC opponents with an out-of-conference traditional rival would get to keep that game if they chose to do so. That means Clemson (vs. South Carolina), Florida State (vs. Florida), Louisville (vs. Kentucky) and Georgia Tech (vs. Georgia) would be able to keep their non-conference rivalry game should they choose to do so.
The biggest rivalry game for the other 10 ACC opponents is an in-conference squad.
If the ACC and Notre Dame work out an extended scheduling agreement in 2020, without Notre Dame having to make a full commitment to the league for 2020, it would give the Irish far more options.
Ideally, the two would want avoid having league teams travel to Notre Dame in back-to-back seasons whenever possible, so looking at who comes to Notre Dame in 2021 and who played there in 2019 would need to be a part of the discussion.
Here’s the ideal scenario for Notre Dame in 2020 with this kind of extended schedule, assuming the four teams with non-conference rivalries keep those games.
Home Games
Miami
Duke
Syracuse
NC State
Liberty
Western Michigan
Road/Neutral Games
vs. Wisconsin
at Wake Forest
at Pittsburgh
at BYU
at Navy
at Boston College
Neither of these options give Notre Dame an incredibly sexy schedule, but it would be a quality schedule that would allow the Irish to make a playoff push.
CONFERENCE ONLY
The 11-game conference only schedule could get interesting, but there are pathways for Notre Dame there as well.
The first thing Notre Dame would do in this instance is get Army, BYU, Liberty, UMass, New Mexico State on the schedule. Again, the ACC is not going to want to jeopardize its relationship with Notre Dame, so it is hard for me to accept the notion that the 2020 season would be one without the Irish and ACC playing five games together.
At the very least Notre Dame would then have 10 games, and Navy would also likely do everything it could to still play the Irish.
Notre Dame could also work out a deal with the MAC where that conference would agree to have several teams get home games against Notre Dame. Programs in that league are seriously strapped for cash, as we saw with Akron and Bowling Green deciding to cut non-revenue sports.
A Notre Dame road game pay day would be incredibly important for the conference.
It won’t be easy, but there’s a clear path to Notre Dame having at least a 10-game season even if the worst case scenario that still involves games being played happens.
The doomsday scenario is that Notre Dame is forced into a conference, but I don't see the leadership at Notre Dame getting pressured into that scenario.
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