I figure our current toughness of schedule is more than plenty - and these a**holes want to make it tougher?
Hey, I'm all for playing the best, but 4-4-4 is a suicide pact that will ensure a National Championship maybe once every hundred years. And in case they haven't noticed, a lot of the other good teams are looking for patsies to play in the non-conference, not someone who could upset the applecart on the way to their BCS bid. Retards.
I support the 4-4-4, but only if we play 4 top ten teams (on the road), 4 top 20 team (on the road), four more top ten teams (at neutral sites).
Clearly, that's the best way to approach things, especially if we have a young team with a thin depth chart. Baptism by fire! It's the only way Notre Dame football should be.
Amen, Sean. Amen.
Until college football decides a better method of selecting a champion than matching up the best team in the country and Ohio State, there is no point at all in playing a challenging schedule.
True, Notre Dame has, and always should, abstained from playing any team not in Division I-A. In this era of FSU scheduling 2 (TWO!) such teams, that alone should be enough to satisfy these NDnation hacks who want ND to be "different". We are different, ass-hats, in more ways than just our schedule.
Also, I'd like to highlight Sean's complaint about the inability to predict who will be an "elite" team or a cupcake. The 4-4-4 model presupposes this will be easy to sort out, but it is patently untrue. Not to mention that, in all likelihood, what will be seized on by the ESPN crowd will not be ND's fearsome four-some, but our deliberate scheduling of 4 patsies. (And how about that for bulletin-board material, to know that you're one of the last "4"?)
But the biggest danger of the 4-4-4 lies in the murky middle. The risk you run, being that a mediocre program is by definition one that could go either way, is that you end up playing 6 or more "elite" teams in a given season. Or, conversely, 8 patsies. All depending on just how well Kevin White polishes his crystal ball.
The solution? Stick with what works. Namely, decades of tradition against time-tested opponents like USC, Michigan, Purdue, MSU, etc. Spiced up with the occasional Oklahoma or Duke.
Definately the 4-4-4 model is a complete joke. But i would like to see a marquee matchup once a year that isn't named Michigan or USC. Something to spice up national attention and recruiting. I wouldn't like the only variety in my team's schedule to be patsy's. That's the SEC way of doing things.
To be fair, the SEC deserves scheduling patsies with their brutal conference schedule. I agree that 3 marquee games would be nice--we are scheduling this in the future with games like Oklahoma. To do that every year might get overwhelming.
"matching up the best team in the country and Ohio State"
Hliarious.
Thank goodness someoen else feels the same way. I think these idiots are completely off the wall. Why not play the pre-season Top 12 teams all on the road! Would that shut up those morons?
Agreed, Sean. Rockne's 30s era philosophy of playing the best in the land was only plausible b/c the best was a relatively stable set of "traditional powerhouses" and "perennial contenders".
I pointed out over on the NDNation posts, as you have here, that we compete in a completely different landscape today with yesterday's BCS contender becoming tomorrow's cupcake and vice versa - a point the moderator pointedly ignored when countering my arguments. For the love of Mike, doesn't anybody remember when USC sucked in the 80s and we counted on a victory over them in the 90s?
Folks who argue in absolutes make absolute jackasses of themselves. If anyone's interested in reviving Rockne's barnstorming, let's talk about scheduling a team from each conference each year. Hell, we're independent, right? What better way to assert ourselves as the melting pot of college football than to take all applicants, large, small, or otherwise who want to play? What better way to say, "Shit, don't pull that 'weak conference card' here, pal, we've played them all and (hopefully) won"?
Then again, don't start me on the whole "strong conference/weak conference" bullshit that's no less a media conception than hallmark holidays like "national give your boss some cheap shit from our store day"... I'll bore you to tears with the notions of self-fulfilling and self-serving declarations, not to mention the marrow-sucking symbiots who get to stir the pot for ratings. "It's clear that God has blessed the SEC with every gift of divine football excellence and the rest should just bask in the glory. Dissenting opinions? The lines are open."
"It's clear that God has blessed the SEC with every gift of divine football excellence and the rest should just bask in the glory. Dissenting opinions? The lines are open."
Dear God...do you have to listen to that jackass Mark Packer in the afternoons, too?
Look. I hate hearing as often as we do that the SEC is "teh roxxorzz!!!11!1!" from your ESPN's of the world. But it's true...they have been and are playing a different level of football down there--just the speed difference in changing from a Big 10 game to an SEC game is noticeable.
Look at it this way. Do you think the 2006 Irish squad would've gone 10-3 with an SEC conference schedule. I don't.
I do believe that the SEC is an incredibly tough conference, but not nearly as tough as it looks on TV. Remember, damn near 100% of SEC games are played against each other or against a southern Division II school. There's not much of a frame of reference there. That being said, I can't deny that the SEC has unbelievable depth from top to bottom and a ridiculous collection of elite coaches.
I think we have to schedule like the perrenial National Championship teams do. If that means working in an Akron, Youngstown or App State (well, maybe not App State), then that's what we should do.
The last time ND won a NC in 1988 things were different. We need to adapt to the times.
Personally, I don't think ANY D1 team should be allowed to schedule a D1AA opponent, but since they all do it, well, that's reality.
We should never, ever, drop to D-1AA for our schedules. Ever. We take enough shit for scheduling Navy. There are plenty of D-1 doormats that would love to suckle at the golden teat of Notre Dame's football revenue and will gladly come in and take their beating and their hefty paycheck and return to the cellars of their respective leagues.
In respect to the SEC, yes, they are filled with monster teams and a collection of great coaches. Living in the south, though, I'm just tired of hearing about how God himself couldn't quarterback and win against a tough SEC defense.
George, there's no need for ND to give up its higher ground by scheduling I-AA teams. We should, as is true Notre Dame tradition, be trying to elevate college football standards, not playing down to them.
For one, we can stop this non-sense about Navy being a patsy. When someone equates the Naval Academy with Youngstown State, please do your Irish duty of refuting that charge. While we can only speculate what direction their program will take under their new coach, certainly during the Johnson era they were always a formidable opponent, with a resume that included upsets over Pitt, Notre Dame, and what should've been a bowl victory over BC. They will likely never be ranked, but they've had at least 8 victories in every year since 2003.
We should not schedule "4" elite teams every year, certainly. But there is still something to be said for playing a respectable schedule of exclusively I-A opponents.
Besides... I could think of maybe a dozen reasons why I would want ND to get rid of Kevin White, and his role in ND's future schedules wouldn't be one of them.
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