If you are a college football fan who considers those memories to be manna from heaven, then the announcement by Notre Dame on Tuesday is a heartbreaker. But if you sit where Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick sits, you may understand why Michigan is expendable. Once you set aside tradition and passion, Michigan doesn't offer Notre Dame anything that it can't get elsewhere.
Of course, tradition and passion are what separate college football from the other beasts in the American sports jungle. But Vegas will tell you that tradition and passion are two-touchdown underdogs to the athletic department balance sheet for a reason.
Of the remaining seven slots on the Notre Dame schedule, one will be filled by USC, Notre Dame's most storied rival. They will play their 84th game this season. One will go to Stanford, and not at all because Swarbrick graduated from Stanford Law School. Notre Dame likes the affiliation with Stanford (see brains, brawn) and playing the Cardinal means that the Irish will play a football game in California every season.
Notre Dame also will not turn its back on Navy, which kept the school alive during World War II by placing a V-12 training program there. Notre Dame shows its gratitude by playing the Midshipmen in perpetuity (and occasionally in Dublin).
That leaves four games on the schedule, three of which are currently filled by Michigan, Michigan State and Purdue. What that says is that the divorce -- or is it a separation? -- of Notre Dame and Michigan is actually a casualty of the inability of Notre Dame and the Big Ten to find a way to join together.
That is a story that goes back nearly a century, and has been almost rom-com in the way that love went unrequited on both sides of the relationship. When Notre Dame wanted to join the Big Ten in the 1920s, the conference said no. Michigan athletic director Fielding Yost led the effort to blackball the Catholic institution.
When the Big Ten and Notre Dame discussed membership several years ago, Notre Dame refused to commit its entire football schedule. In the ACC, Notre Dame found a conference of like-minded schools that is willing to let the Irish be Irish. The deal with the ACC, in the end, will curtail the relationship that Notre Dame has with Big Ten members. It didn't have to be mutually exclusive. But that's how Notre Dame chose to play it.
