Notre Dame plays football to connect with its alumni and sell the brand of the school, generally. It works for the school, and reaching out to various sections of the country is part of the plan. And so long as the older segment of society fawns on what Notre Dame is selling, the Irish will remain prominent enough to field what seems like a really good team every few years and a competitive team most years.

I liken Notre Dame football to a living football museum that lives off selling the nostalgia of Knute Rockne and Lou Holtz and everything in between, but very little after. Notre Dame is Michigan with somewhat higher academic requirements, or Duke with a bigger recruiting footprint. Notre Dame is not Alabama or Clemson or Texas or Ohio State, knows it can't be and doesn't want to be. Notre Dame is not even USC or Miami, private schools that would like to be national powerhouses and, consequently, are willing to cut corners that the current Notre Dame does not.

The demographics that made it possible for Notre Dame to be a national powerhouse up through the 1980s no longer exist. The population of the industrial midwest and northeast has changed. In most but not all places, the presence and influence of Catholic schools has waned.

Notre Dame's campus is nice enough, but the fact of the matter is that it ought to be 10 times easier to convince the great majority of kids with options to spend four years of their life in the warmth of the south or in some relatively modern city like, say, Columbus, Ohio, than to do so in a nondescript town in northern Indiana.

But Notre Dame makes things work. The typical Notre Dame schedule typically carries enough marquee games to keep people excited and enough mediocre opponents to get the Irish to 8 wins. When the cycle of talent and experience is right, Notre Dame is going to win 10 games and go to a major bowl because television likes them some Irish. And once in a blue moon, the Irish will win 11 or 12, make the playoff and get absolutely drilled by Alabama or Clemson, like most schools (including Tech) generally would. That is and ought to be good enough for the great majority of schools.

Notre Dame doesn't need a conference championship to make its plan works. Notre Dame needs the ACC only insofar as the ACC can provide a steady supply of five or six games each year that includes a mix of schmucks the Irish will beat with a couple of big names that make for good television. That makes scheduling cheaper and simpler for Notre Dame and eliminates the necessity of filling those slots - most particularly in late October through November - with Western Michigan or some other off-brand schools while the Big Ten and its ilk are devoted to late season conference matchups.

That said, the notion that Notre Dame's typical schedule is more competitive than the typical ACC schedule is a joke. Sure, when the "brands" that the Irish frequently play are hot - USC, Michigan, Stanford - the schedule is good. And I will concede that Irish fans would prefer to see the variety of a "national" schedule versus a glut of ACC programs with which they have no history and that carry modest cache. But don't play three home games against New Mexico, Bowling Green and Navy as Notre Dame did last year, or Ball State and Vandy at home and Northwestern in Chicago as the year before, or Temple and Miami (OH) the year before that, couple it with the "brands" and the usual mix of ACC brands and schmucks and try to convince the world that the schedule is incredibly more difficult than an ACC schedule most years. All Notre Dame does is play a New Mexico instead of a Wake Forest and a USC instead of a Miami and a Georgia instead of a Florida State. This is not the late 1970s or early 1980s, when playing USC, Michigan and the great national independents of the day - Pitt, Penn State, Miami, et al. - sometimes made for a genuinely brutal schedule.

If the ACC had made wise expansion decisions that were good for football, like avoiding BC and Syracuse, bringing in a school that cared about football like WVU, and holding on to Maryland, a school that has some dysfunction but more football history than most ACC schools can muster, then I would be the first in line to kick Notre Dame to the curb and suggest they enjoy a schedule that is half marquee names and half a glut of service academies and Western Michigan. But as things are and will be, the ACC-ND relationship is good for both sides. And at least ND wants to and tries to do things the right way, which is more than can be said for some of our own conference brethren.