Five Wide Fullbacks returns following the opening weekend of college football which saw our beloved Fighting Irish swat away the United States Naval Academy in Ireland. This week we are tackling injury reports in college football, how USC looked in their opener, new locations for an international Notre Dame game, the hypocrisy of football and conference scheduling, plus the ACC adding more teams.
1) Following Notre Dame’s 3rd-ever trip to Ireland this past weekend where are there other interesting international games for the Irish to play in the future?
It’s important to realize there’s a difference between an awesome fan-made list for such an event and one that would interest the University of Notre Dame leadership. Look no further than Jack Swarbick mentioning a game in China versus Stanford back in 2012 because of Notre Dame’s “great working relationship” with the Cardinal. They would be looking for an environment where a wide range of university employees from both schools can make the trip and hobnob together for days worth of conferences and dinners.
A list made by a fan is more interesting. Here are 5 choices for the future:
Melbourne Cricket Ground
Melbourne, Australia
vs. Texas
I do not understand cricket (I tried so hard watching on TV during my honeymoon in St. Lucia) and have no frame of reference for many things in Australia except I know this stadium is enormous and would be cool to play American football inside of some day. This would be one doozy of a plane ride that would definitely need a large opposing fan base to make it worth the trip.
Tottenham Hotspur Stadium
London, England
vs. Oklahoma
Selfishly, I’d like to see this happen and kill 2 fandom birds with 1 stone. The NFL has been playing games at the home of Spurs for 4 years and will be doing so twice per year through 2028. If we’re looking to expand college football to England this is the place to start.
Camp Nou
Barcelona, Spain
vs. Florida State
This would arguably be the most famous stadium for the Irish to play in on continental Europe, plus the weather could be awesome with plenty of entertainment options throughout Catalonia.
Just a little 1.5 billion dollar renovation.
The club just started renovation on the stadium this past June and will be playing elsewhere until the summer of 2026. When it’s complete it’ll look amazing with a seating capacity of 105,000. Notre Dame should book a college football game there for the future.
Sangam
Seoul, South Korea
vs. UCLA
I was thinking of a spot in Asia that would work and Tokyo would be the first choice, I’m sure. Although, they played that weird Tokyo Bowl game back in 2009 inside the Tokyo Dome and the Irish played a real game against Miami at Japan National Stadium (then called Olympic Stadium) all the way back in 1979. I would think a trip to Korea would be pretty fun.
Stadia della Roma
Rome, Italy
vs. Clemson
Most of the time a trip to Italy and Rome are mentioned as the top choice of a new international location for a Notre Dame game. However, the options for a game in Rome are not great at the moment. The Stadio Olimpico is old and historic but it’s way too spread out with the huge track surrounding the field. Notre Dame should wait for the new Stadia della Roma to be built and then play there someday. I know most bring up playing Boston College in Rome, but we’d need a real villain in this type of situation. Step up Dabo Swinney.
2) Several years ago the NCAA debated making weekly injury reports mandatory for all football teams but later backed off the idea. Recently, the Big Ten instituted their own conference-wide rule stating that injury reports need to be published by each team 2 hours prior to kickoff. Will we see the NCAA re-think their approach by next season?
This seems pretty likely, even though you could argue the NCAA has far bigger issues to tackle. Still, as we’ve seen with the issues in the state of Iowa this off-season, the issues of gambling continue to bubble up throughout the sport and forcing teams to declare their injuries before games is an easy way to remove another layer of horseplay from the situation.
Of course, like the NFL, any attempt to institute this would need to come with significant penalties and fines for any programs that try monkey business as a way to gain a competitive advantage. Notre Dame tweets out a quasi-injury report each week but it’s not very thorough or descriptive. I wonder if that will be changing in the future or if the Irish would potentially follow any rules that will be made inside the ACC.
3) USC led by only 7 points at halftime against San Jose State this weekend before pulling away late. What did we learn about the Trojans after their debut game in 2023?
There were 2 big takeaways from the Trojans opener. One, their defense looked really shaky giving up 6 yards per play to SJSU. In the Alex Grinch DC era, USC has now allowed at least 6 yards per play in 9 out of 15 games, including their last 5 games dating back to last year and 8 out of their last 9 games total. This is a massive red flag for a team with Pac-12 and National Championship aspirations.
Brent Brennan is kind of Doing Good Things™ at San Jose State, but USC shouldn’t be allowing almost 200 yards at 7.3 per rush to a mid-tier Mountain West team. This is supposed to be a re-tooled Trojans defense that was replacing a lot of starters from a year ago and the 1st game report card was pretty bad.
The second takeaway is that true freshman 5-star receiver Zachariah Branch out of Bishop Gorman is going to be a problem for USC opponents. He got the first carry for USC for 12 yards, caught 4 passes for 58 yards and 1 touchdown, took 3 punts back for 66 yards, and took 1 kick return to the house for 96 yards.
4) Would the addition of Stanford, Cal, and SMU to the ACC be savvy business or charity?
The ACC was set to vote again on the additions of these schools on Monday night but postponed things following the on-campus shooting at North Carolina. All of this is a sad reflection of the problems going on in the United States.
We do know that league commissioner Jim Phillips is on board with the additions but that Florida State, Clemson, North Carolina, and NC State are the 4 schools against the move. All of the reporting also suggests that if there teams that would love to leave the ACC for the SEC or Big Ten you could rank them in this exact order of the dissidents.
This is mostly charity coming from the ACC with the naivety that it’ll help them in the long-term.
SMU outta nowhere!
Recently, Swarbrick said “you can’t have two great academic institutions not have a place to play” but of course there are other athletic options for these schools beyond the Pac-12 or ACC. Both the Cardinal and Golden Bears are expected to join for 30% shares while SMU (no word from Swarbrick on this institution) will reportedly join with no broadcast revenue for 7 years. Seven years!
The more important factor is how well the ACC implements their plans for a tiered payout structure based (largely) on football success. I don’t see how that will be enough for the bigger teams and it’s guaranteed to create an even more fractured rich vs. poor league anyway. I’ll also be interested to see how Notre Dame negotiates itself within this tiered payout pyramid. Would we get a percentage of football money even though we aren’t eligible for the ACC Championship (one of the key payout bonuses being discussed)?
5) Will conference realignment ever bring about a different, and more competitive, scheduling model in college football?
I think there will always be an internal struggle for college football fans when it comes to the scheduling structure in this sport. I saw a post on r/CFB over the weekend lamenting the lack of big games in week 0 and how it’s kind of lame and anticlimactic. My first instinct was to agree, the Notre Dame game ended and there wasn’t much flash going on for the rest of the sport last weekend. That was largely hissed away with cries of “Go watch the NFL instead!” or “I enjoyed the hell out of FIU at Louisiana Tech!”
It’s really hard to reconcile the Sickos Committee-type “embrace the little and weird games” with the sport’s large size and lack of really big games. And yet, we have these programs coalescing into larger leagues together but the sport will only give up the buy games and weak out of conference scheduling pried from their cold, dead hands.
College football feels a lot like the English football tiered system, except we don’t have relegation and for now there are still a handful of strong programs littered throughout the several levels of competition. But, we’re moving closer and closer to where there will be a Premier League, or maybe 2 Premier Leagues, except they will never play everyone within their own league and then also seek out easy game outside of the league.
It feels like FBS really should be around 60 teams only these days, and if fans enjoy Akron at UNLV that won’t be diminished if it’s technically a lower level of football in name. But even if they did trim down FBS I’m sure they would write in rules stating teams were allowed 2 non-FBS games per year because I’m convinced no one will play 12 Power (whatever) programs every season.
USC at the actual colosseum instead of their cheesy replica?
I heard they are putting in natural grass for the Zuck-Musk fight.
Notre Dame has a vested interest in keeping the ACC together for a place for their olympic sports, scheduling, football recruiting in hot spots, and a high level of competition in minor sports. Lacrosse’s national championship was a product of that high level of conference play.
Many of their members are included in the AAU as are Stanford and Berkeley so the commitment to research are compatible based on that and membership may facilitate combined research (Notre Dame was recently admitted).
Should the ACC vote membership for those three, ESPN kicks in $72 million additionally to their ACC media contract and has access to Dallas and the Bay area viewers – as does Notre Dame. (Expansion is driven by media contract decisions.)
When Notre Dame played only ACC opponents during Covid – and in the Championship, the ACC had record revenue to distribute. ACC expansion with more money from ESPN would see the bump in revenue to distribute among existing member institutions under those favorable terms.
Notre Dame also plays Stanford annually through 2024, which would be a de facto sixth ACC game. Should USC wish to lighten their non-conference schedule and USC does not renew their contract with ND, without Stanford, we don’t have any West Coast game exposure.
As far as profitablity of athletic departments, here’s Stanford’s and Cal’s (site can be searched for other schools) broken down by athletic programs.
Stanford University Sports Information University of California – Berkeley Sports Information
Dallas has been a friendly site to ND football games. SMU is committed to expanding their stadium but is still smallish, which would mean a game there could be moved to something larger.
If Stanford joins the ACC, we play Stanford every year, and we don’t otherwise reduce the number of ACC games we have to play… I mean, come on, what are we even doing here?
I guess that would be in line with Swarbrick just going out on a down note all around.
The ND-Stanford contract runs only through 2024. Then should they be in the ACC, they’d be in the five ACC games we would play annually. That doesn’t mean that the ACC won’t shuffle the schedule in 2024 to reflect expansion teams or a la BIG Flex Protect Plus model.
One does wonder why the new media deal has not been announced. Does ACC expansion into new markets with possible new scheduling including ND impact ESPN’s contract with the ACC above and beyond the $72 mill they would contribute? Swarbrick may have some leverage here. Could ND accept a lower percentage of ACC money with expansion? Is there enough projected revenue into new markets and new scheduling to not only keep the ACC intact but to have ESPN reconsidering their ironclad media contract with the ACC? What about the non-CFP bowl bids with the ACC and ND’s ranking for those? How does a new media partner regard their future home game scheduling?
Lots of potential moving parts.
So listened to the audible yesterday or today and feldman was doubling down on usc. I really like feldman and enjoy his perspective and experience but between the absolute ballwashing of michigan and doubling down on usc after their game last weekend, it’s a bit rough. he was talking up hartman and said “I think he could elevate them to top 10”, so like 3 spots ahead of where they opened?!?