Notre Dame has treasured and monetized its football independence in a way that few, if any, other colleges could approach, let alone replicate.
Conference officials have tried to sway the Fighting Irish toward their leagues for decades, and whenever a major expansion cycle takes place, college athletics’ knee-jerk reaction immediately kicks in Notre Dame’s direction.
The same question gets asked move after move: Will this force Notre Dame to join a conference? So far, the Irish have stayed independent in football. And as Pete Sampson wrote, it’s likely that Notre Dame’s relationship with NBC can keep the Irish independent.
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Notre Dame joined the Big East for all sports but football in 1995, then shifted to the ACC for a similar arrangement in 2013. In between those moves was a high-profile dalliance between Notre Dame and the Big Ten. It was likely as close as Notre Dame has come to joining a conference for football.
Former Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany first sought Notre Dame in 1991, a year after Penn State was voted as the league’s 11th member. Negotiations went dormant until 1999, when Delany aggressively pursued Notre Dame and it became the primary topic in college football. Football was the main motivator for Delany. For Notre Dame, the Big Ten was a perfect fit for its other sports and the league’s academic cooperative was something the northern Indiana Catholic university had to review.
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Ultimately, football independence was too embedded into the university culture, and Notre Dame’s board of trustees rejected a path to Big Ten membership.
“From their perspective, they had historic, bad feelings about the Big Ten,” Delany said. “They felt — and I’ve read this — I don’t know this for a fact that Fielding Yost worked overtime to keep (Knute) Rockne and Notre Dame out of the Big Ten in the ’20s. I never saw any of that, for the most part. Our schools wanted to play them, and they did. But nevertheless, part of the Notre Dame mindset was they had been discriminated against. I think they also loved independence and the freedom that it gave them.”
Notre Dame first applied for the Big Ten in 1899 alongside Indiana and Iowa. When the charter members gathered at the Chicago Beach Hotel on Dec. 1 1899, delegates from Indiana and Iowa were present. Notre Dame sent no officials to the meeting. The Hoosiers and Hawkeyes became Big Ten members while Notre Dame was not invited. In 1926, Rockne and the Irish were interested in joining the Big Ten, but Yost and his Michigan contingent reportedly worked against Notre Dame for membership. For a century, Yost’s supposed actions have left a scar on the relationship between the entities.
“At the end of the day, and I don’t know exactly why, they had a historic sensibility that they had been discriminated against,” Delany said. “It’s not really articulated very much, but it’s felt, I could tell you. Also, there were people, and I’m not sure they were necessarily presidents or ADs, but there were people in their governance system who felt like they would not support Notre Dame if Notre Dame gave up their independence. I can’t name names because I don’t know the names. I just know that on a couple of occasions, the discussions went pretty far, and then they just dropped. They just dropped, and there was no deal to be had. And beyond that, I can’t give you any more detail.”
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Unlike most conferences, the Big Ten had no interest in expanding just to add a championship game. After Penn State began Big Ten play in 1993, the league entertained several conversations with prospective members but had little interest until Delany announced in 2009 it would consider expansion. Membership in the Association of American Universities (AAU), a prestigious research consortium, was a prerequisite for Big Ten interest. Notre Dame was the anomaly.
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“They were about TV, and they were about independence,” Delany said. “They weren’t very interested in the Big Ten. I didn’t have a strong feeling one way or the other. But I did have a sense that if we were going to expand in the Midwest, if we’re going to expand from 11 to 12 — because there wasn’t a conference that was larger than 12 — but if it was only about 12, I can’t tell you how many times people wanted to come in as a 12th member.
“If they weren’t in the AAU — Notre Dame was not in the AAU — if they weren’t in a contiguous state, and if they didn’t have AAU, and if they didn’t bring a lot of value, there was no interest in the Big Ten expanding again. However, Notre Dame was an exception to that. They approached us a number of times, in the ’90s and early 2000s, to begin a conversation. That was a conversation we engaged, but it was never at the end finally fruitful. It just wasn’t.”
The interest was mutual, but partial membership was a non-starter for Delany.
“It was only on the basis of being a full member, no special deals, no special TV arrangements, no special anything,” Delany said. “If Notre Dame had been ready, willing and able to come in as an equal member, that would have probably moved us. But there was never such a moment.”
By December 2009, when the Big Ten announced it would become active in potential expansion, Notre Dame was no longer a target.
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“I thought Notre Dame was not a moveable institution,” Delany said. “They demonstrated that to me before. We continued to play them and have them now in the conference as an affiliate member in hockey. But that’s their call. They had certain feelings about independence and TV, and we have certain feelings about all or nothing.
“In the Big East, they had worked through a relationship in their Olympic sports, and they worked through the same relationship with the ACC. But that kind of relationship was never available to them from us. Ever. And that’s why that didn’t happen. In my mind, that was off the table.”
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Through the Big Ten’s multiple rounds of realignment, from adding Nebraska, Maryland and Rutgers in the past decade to USC and UCLA joining the league in 2024, the Notre Dame topic always comes up. Is it possible for the Irish to remain independent well into the future?
Delany says yes.
“Notre Dame is fully capable of surviving this environment,” Delany said. “I think they have made it clear as long as they have the access to the Playoff and their own network, they’re fine.”
Editor’s note: This story is part of The Athletic’s Realignment Revisited series, digging into the past, present and future of conference realignment in college sports. Follow the series and find more conference realignment stories here.
(Top photo: Getty Images)