The Front Row

Dave,
How can you even begin to believe that ND is afraid to join the Big Ten? You Bucknut guys need to get you heads out of your biased sands and be more objective like John Cooper was in his responses to your ridiculous statements. I guarantee you that if you were to form a brand new conference that included the top teams in the country, as long as those teams were located all across the country, that if ND decided to leave their independent status in football that they would jump on the opportunity to join a conference like that. They are not looking to join a cupcake conference. What they would want would be a conference that spread across as much key football recruiting geography as possible to keep their national approach to recruiting. If they play ranked teams across the country each season they are visible to these recruits. That is why the ACC may be a better fit for them than the Big Ten because it keeps them visible in some of their key recruiting areas of Florida and along the Atlantic and East Coast as well as the Midwest and California since they would still schedule USC every year. The Big Ten would limit their visibility to more of a northern and midwestern limited geography. Another reason the ACC is probably more attractive to ND is that their "Olympic" sports and women's sports would be much better served in the ACC since that conference has more powerful teams than the Big Ten in those sports (eg. Men's Lacross, Women's Basketball and softball, Men's baseball, men's and Women's soccer, men's cross country, etc.) The Big Ten is very strong in football and basketball but the ACC is better in basketball, most "Olympic sports" and not bad at all in football. If the super conferences are formed in would probably force ND from being independent because it would be difficult to schedule even an adequate football schedule. For ND to be successful they need to play games across as much of the country as possible to get exposure to recruits. If the bulk of ND's recruiting were limited to the midwest ND would have great difficulty winning the recruiting battles versus OSU, MSU, Michigan, Penn State, Nebraska and Wisconsin for midwest recruits. If they are going to compete at the highest levels of football they have to recruit beyond the midwest in a big way. ND is a different kind of school than most of the Big Ten schools other than maybe Northwestern so they need a bigger recruiting geography to compete for the top recruits. In fact joining the Big Ten might make their football program more like Northwestern. They aspire to play at a higher level than the middle of a conference although they certainly have not been at that higher level recently, but Brian Kelly seems to be moving them in the right direction.