Yeah, and I think that the history of how it went down and how we got to super-conferences provides more context. I, for one, applaud ND for telling the rest of the world to fuck off. They are playing by the rules the giants of the CFB set.
- ND tried to join the Big Ten. Twice, I believe. They were turned down. And in a fit of anti-Papism, which was a potent political force at the time, the precursor to the Big Ten organized a boycott from scheduling them.
- In response they took their show on the road and built a national brand and fan-base of “Catholics.” By mid-century the Big Ten would have taken them but why would ND want to now?
- Through the 1980s being an independent power was nothing odd and no one blinked an eye. ND won NCs, so did PSU, Pitt, Miami, or got bent over FSU’s rise.
- In 1984 UGA and OU sued the NCAA to break their monopoly on national TV media rights, as proxies for the SEC/Big 8. ND did not join that suit. The end result was that schools or conferences could bargain their rights. This is the moment where conferences ceased being regional alliances and became money-making sports cartels. This is why the SWC no longer made any sense, and why college football fans suddenly started caring about media market presence.
- Within a decade all the other independents joined. Note— they didn’t have to and could have sold rights like ND did. There were no offers worth more to them than joining a consortium would be. Note also, Texas approached CBS about an ND-like deal in the 1990s and got told “not now.”
- Notre Dame, as you mention, could make the numbers work and they did it with NBC. They could do it because of their own brand-building for decades and because power conferences sued the NCAA to give them the structure to do it.
Yes, ND is uniquely positioned to make money outside of a conference. That provides some competitive advantages. But they’re playing by the rules others set. I don’t see the SEC/Big Ten powerhouses waving their hands to voluntarily disarm their NIL qualitative advantage. Them’s the breaks, and getting overly agitated at ND for playing really well in the game others designed comes off as really sour grapes, as does continually trying to force others to abandon an advantage thet came by fairly.
Let’s talk first about a NCAA-wide voluntary NIL salary cap or NIL redistribution before changing rules to make ND go in on a revenue redistribution scheme they don’t want a part of.