ACC again moves farther away from its roots
Touchdown Jesus had a great view of something no one had ever seen before at Notre Dame: two ACC logos on the football field, on each 25-yard line. The famous mural overlooking the equally famous stadium wasn’t wearing an ACC patch, but the Notre Dame players were.
Such an oddity had never even been considered, until now. For the first time in 132 years of football, Notre Dame played a football game that counted in conference standings. And after Saturday’s 27-13 win over Duke, the Irish have never lost a conference game in those 132 years.
Notre Dame’s first official (if temporary and circumstantial) ACC football game opens the doors to any number of bizarre considerations, from Joe Montana’s future ACC Legend candidacy to the Fighting Irish celebrating a conference championship for the first time in its storied football history.
Even the thought of such an affiliation had been the height of sacrilege in South Bend, until a pandemic hit and suddenly Notre Dame went running for the arms of the ACC.
So as Duke makes another visit to Notre Dame -- the Blue Devils won the last time they were there, in 2016 -- not only is the ACC getting a piece of Notre Dame’s cherished NBC money, this one actually counts in the standings.
The ACC ditched its divisions this year but after seven different Coastal champions in seven seasons, Notre Dame would definitely make it eight-for-eight if the Irish advance to face Clemson in Charlotte, which is where Vegas has its money.
This is supposed to be a COVID-19 one-off, but it’s also hard to ignore just how deeply Notre Dame has intertwined itself into the ACC in everything but football. There are 20 people on the search committee tasked with replacing John Swofford when the current commissioner retires next year. Not only is Notre Dame president the Rev. John Jenkins a co-chairman of that committee, there are five ACC schools that have two representatives on that committee. Notre Dame, despite being only a partial member of the conference, is one of the five with a pair of voices.
That’s an awful lot of power for a school that isn’t even fully on board with ACC membership.
Except at the moment.
It’s weird to think of Notre Dame playing ACC football, but in some ways it’s just another step in the natural evolution of the ACC into something new and different from what it has traditionally been, for better or worse. What was once a group of like-minded regionally colocated universities who would all assemble in the same building on one weekend every March is now a collection of vastly different schools spread across a third of the country who are primarily engaged in the production of television programming.
Which is how a school that until now was too good for ACC football was somehow welcomed into the conference with open arms for a single season. (“Somehow” translates to “a bag of money with a multicolored peacock on it.”)
“We’ll keep it in the conference,” NBC’s Jac Collinsworth, a former ACC Network host, said at halftime as he went through the ACC scoreboard. “Feels a little weird to say that.”
If that sounds and feels weird — and it does, and it should — ACC fans have had to reconcile themselves to any amount of similar cognitive dissonance in the expansion era.
Notre Dame playing ACC football feels like the time official ACC Legend honoree Derrick Coleman referred to Greensboro as “Greenville” at the ACC tournament, a fitting malaprop considering Coleman actually played in the Big East and had never, ever thought of himself as an ACC player. Nor would have anyone else.
In that era, the high-flying ACC played above the rim with skill and grace, the six-foul Big East under the rim in a puddle of blood and dislodged dental work. The styles were as effective in their own way as they were different, but there’s absolutely nothing about Coleman that is connected in any way with the ACC other than his affiliation with Syracuse.
The ACC has had no choice but to engage in that kind of retconning in an attempt to bring this Brady Bunch of schools with different histories and personalities together. Finding a way to fit Notre Dame’s tradition of football independence into the family, temporarily or permanently, is a new challenge: the kind of challenge a future ACC Legend named Joe Montana took on time and time again during his glorious ACC career.
This story was originally published September 12, 2020 at 2:33 PM.
