I’m 100% for a SEC/ACC football challenge.
9 conference games
1 ACC challenge game
1 other P5 OOC game (B1G/B12/PAC)
1 guaranteed home game from the G5
That gets Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, and Georgia 6 home/5 away/1 neutral site and everyone else 7 one year and 6 the next.
For the challenge, you lock in UF/FSU, UGA/GT, SC/Clem, UK/UL as permanent rivalries and then rotate the other 12.
Obviously with the numbers, this would be unbalanced but rather than not including Vandy each year I could see ND being included in this agreement (especially if it’s mid season and not in the first 3 weeks).
ND has recently played Texas, Georgia, Vanderbilt, Oklahoma and has games against aggy, Arkansas, Alabama, Florida on their future schedules. This would give ND its 9th predictable game: USC, Stanford, Navy, 5x ACC, 1x SEC…so they’d only need 3 more games basically just like every other school. This would also get ESPN 3 guaranteed Irish games each year and give ND more sure footing as an independent to hopefully keep them from jumping to the B1G.
For #16 they could again just drop one SEC team but I’d hope they might ‘adopt’ Tulane for the challenge (former SEC member and ESPN owns the AAC’s rights too) to the ACC’s side to even out the numbers (if it had to be a true independent they could pull in UConn but Tulane has more interest due to their history and better football that makes them more attractive).
Mock schedule:
Bama/ND*
Texas/UNC
Oklahoma/Miami
LSU/NCSU
aggy/VA Tech
Tenn/UVA
Auburn/Pitt
Arkansas/Syracuse
Ole Miss/Tulane*
Mizzou/WF
MSU/BC
Vandy/Duke