Seven Home Games?
Notre Dame plans on a 7-4-1 schedule model (seven games in South Bend, four on the road and one at a neutral site), with neutral site games with Big East teams starting as early as 2009. The Irish will also play three Big East teams per year beginning in 2011.
Well, as I've already pointed out several times here, Auburn is on the 8-4-0 model this year, without a single road game outside the SEC.
7-4-1? Seems a bit unbalanced, no? With Notre Dame's legion of national supporters and the NBC cheering section, they should insist upon no fewer than nine home games. The greatness of the Irish really merits nothing less ...
Sweet - look forward to those awesome ND vs UConn/USF/Syracuse/Cincinatti games in the near future. Should be barners like the awesome schedule of this year (Army/Navy/AirForce/Coast Guard/National Guard/UNC)
Wow! I thought that was a privilege reserved for Hawaii. However ND's big loses in the past two years have come in front of TD Jesus. Michigan State, USC, Michigan... Maybe not a good idea.
Kiffin does not impress
I believe that he got the job only because his father is Pete Carroll's buddy.
But in terms of job done and considering the talent level, he has has underachieved. I hope I am wrong.
An experienced offensive coordinator always has aces up his sleeve. You could never predict what the previous offensive coordinator (no names) would do.
But it was the expected, with the hours of watching film and tendencies.
I do not see this with this offense.
Innovation is the mother of invention.
Kiffin does not use the whole field, like the previous OC.
Hope opponents just say no.
I hope they don't join the Big East. That will ruin our strength of schedule. Notre Dame sucks.
Good for them. It should be recognized in their reduced strength of schedule. Perhaps this is what the Big Least needs for them to be a legitimate BCS conference.
The ND atheletic director schedules weaklings at home on NBC. What a crock of BS this is. We have to play ohio St, ND, Cal and the entire Pac 10 in 2008. Shame on ND and thier overrated money sucking school.
Typical Notre Dame.
"We have to play most of our games at home. We are now going to schedule Duke, East Carolina and Connecticut to go with Army, Indiana and Navy. We expect all those game to be on national TV. And we expect to be national champs. Why? Because we are Notre Dame."
It's not wonder they are the "dumbers" they never learn. You aren't going to win the BCS game with a schedule full of Duke, Navy, East Carolina and Purdue. But they keep doing it. It's killing them this year. And of course they will never join a conference because they do not want to have to adhere to conference rules or be punished. Like they should of been after the USC game last year for injuring Reed. Or after the MSU game this year.
That whole school/team/program is a joke.
Everything about that school makes me sick
USC doesn't "have" to play anybody of merit, but we do. ND tells people they purposely schedule tough games, but they don't. The only reasons they stopped playing Miami is because they were tired of getting beat.
Even though it makes me feel dirty to defend Notre Dame in any respect, fair is fair. For what it's worth, Notre Dame's schedule is pretty good this year (ranked 26th). Numbers-wise, its schedule is better than Ohio State, Michigan, LSU and Auburn, to name just four.
The Irish play at Georgia Tech, Michigan State and USC, and they host Michigan, Penn State, UCLA and Purdue. And Notre Dame's games with the Air Force and the Navy are both road games.
Besides, if Notre Dame dropped the service academies, the Irish would be slammed for not supporting our troops. :)
This pretty much says it all about scheduling and the Louisville debate, from Pat Forde's Forde-Yard Dash column at espn.com:
Ever since Louisville (2) beat West Virginia (3) 44-34 Thursday, critics have been bashing the two teams and their conference like the most vicious political attack ads. You'd have thought the Big East had come out in favor of flag burning and flag football.
Never, to The Dash's best recollection, has an entertaining game between top-10 teams provoked such a backlash.
The Dash suspects this all comes down to laundry and logos. The trappings of tradition have a funny way of altering perspective. If the arriviste Cardinals had an orange steer on the side of their helmets and the nouveau riche Mountaineers wore cardinal and gold, reviews would have been more favorable.
Pete Carroll's 2005 Trojans aren't the only team that could make defenses look bad.When Texas and USC racked up 1,130 yards and 79 points in the Rose Bowl, it was considered one of the greatest games ever played. When Louisville and West Virginia combine for 1,018 yards and 78 points, it's the result of atrocious defense better suited to the Western Athletic Conference than the BCS Championship Game.
Vince Young, Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart can make good defenses look bad. So can Brian Brohm (4), Steve Slaton (5) and Pat White (6), especially with game plans conceived by Bobby Petrino (7) and Rich Rodriguez (8). Ask SEC blueblood Georgia, which had the No. 8 scoring defense and No. 18 total defense nationally in 2005 but was blown up for 502 yards and 38 points in the Sugar Bowl by West Virginia.
The establishment critics don't want to hear that. They want to decide the championship game on laundry.
"We're new," Petrino said Monday. "We're a new player. There's a lot of tradition at other schools, a lot of tradition in other conferences. We have to go through all this and be able to understand why people say those things."
It's not hard to understand the motivation for knocking the unbeaten Big East teams as national title contenders, but The Dash says that a 12-0 team from that league deserves to play for it all. Just for fun, compare scores of the Big East's best against common opponents for other top 10 teams.
Louisville beat Kentucky by 31 at home. Florida beat the Wildcats by 19 at home. (The Gators, one of the teams Big East bashers were promoting as superior after Thursday night, strutted their stuff Saturday against Vanderbilt. Beat the Commodores by six. Florida hasn't scored more than 28 in a game since Sept. 9 and has outscored its last seven opponents by 7.2 points per game.)
West Virginia beat Mississippi State on the road by 28. Auburn beat the Bulldogs on the road by 34. (Auburn has scored more than 27 points in a game only twice in the last two months -- against Buffalo and Tulane.)
Rutgers beat Illinois by 33, while Ohio State beat the Illini by seven. The Scarlet Knights beat Navy by 34, while Notre Dame beat the Midshipmen by 24.
Louisville won by 18 earlier this season at Kansas State without Brohm. Texas plays in Manhattan Saturday. Think the Longhorns would care to leave Colt McCoy (9) at home and then compare scores?
The one result that doesn't flatter the Big East is against Cincinnati. The Cards wheezed by 23-17 while Ohio State rolled the Bearcats 37-7. But the Buckeyes led against Cincinnati for only 35 minutes and 10 seconds, while Louisville led for a comparable 30:54.
The loudest Big East bashing seems to be coming from Southeastern Conference advocates. Here's the funny thing about that: Ask how many SEC teams are willing to schedule Louisville.
The number is two. According to the Louisville administration, everyone else in the league has ducked, dodged and squirmed away from games with the Cardinals.
Negative campaigning shouldn't keep Bobby Petrino and the Cards out of Glendale.Kentucky does it more out of rote obligation, satisfying the state's mandate to have its two I-A teams play on an annual basis. The Wildcats are so thrilled about the series that they've cravenly demanded moving the games in Lexington off their traditional season-opening date to a spot later in the calendar, when the matchup will draw less attention.
The other SEC school to step up is Georgia, which has agreed to a two-year home-and-home with Louisville starting in 2010.
Vanderbilt backed out of a contract with the Cards that was to start next year. Everyone else in the SEC has passed at least once on home-and-home overtures from Louisville this century, according to senior associate athletic director Kevin Miller.
It's gotten to the point that Louisville is now offering neutral-site games with SEC teams. Miller said he's met with officials in Nashville about scheduling Louisville against Alabama, Arkansas or Tennessee. Athletic director Tom Jurich (10) said he's open to playing an SEC team in the Georgia Dome. They've asked ESPN for help in lining up games, too.
The takers are few -- and not just in the SEC. Among the others who have broken contracts with the Cardinals in recent years, according to Miller: Boston College, Georgia Tech, Duke and Texas Tech.
"[Football scheduling] has become the hardest part of my job," Jurich said.
SEC schools are busy filling out their schedules with home games, largely against chumps. So far in 2006 the league has produced exactly one road win against a nonconference opponent from a Big Six league: Vanderbilt over Duke. The Big East owns six road wins over Big Six opponents in 2006.
This is how you preserve the status quo: refuse to play up-and-coming programs, then howl about their allegedly weak schedules.
But the status quo is four Louisville victories away from taking a thumping. If the Cardinals win out -- beating undefeated Rutgers Thursday, bowl-eligible South Florida Nov. 18, bowl-eligible Pittsburgh Nov. 25, then closing it out Dec. 2 against Connecticut -- and they're not sabotaged in the human polls, they'll likely be headed to Glendale, Ariz.
And no amount of negative campaigning from the establishment schools should stop it.
ND doesn't want to play Boston College regularly in the future either. However, I am not among those who believe ND plays a weak schedule, but I don't buy the "toughest schedule in the nation" claim either. It is nice to be able to guarantee yourself victories against the service academies every year, throw in a couple games with Stanford and Washington and have only 3 or 4 truly tough games to worry about. Spliting those games leads to at worst, a 10-2 season. The Irish go to a BCS game with its $14mm payout. Smart.
LOL @ my 'friend'
They do the same crap every year. They are a middle of the road team, and play 8 games vs. Indiana, army, navy, Duke, the virginia academy of something, and Purdue, and the Notre Dame hype machine goes into full gear and we hear every detail of every player on the team and how great they are and how they are a saint off the field, until they play the 1 tough game on their schedule and get blasted. Then they charge up the hype machine for the rest of the year and Lou Holtz is on ESPN everyday raving about Notre Dame until they play another real team in their bowl and get destroyed.
Kind of like a stupid circle, although like Nels said, it is geared towards the big bucks which is I assume all that they care about.
Looks like Notre Dame will try and do the Georgia method of Scheduleing, though NO ONE can be as bad as Georgia. Here is every game Georgia has played in the regular season on the road West of Louisiana and North of Kentucky.
The Last Time Georgia played a regular season game West of Louisiana was in
1967 versus Houston.
The Last Time Georgia played a regular season game North of Lexington Kentucky was in
1965 versus Michigan
All Games played by Georgia West of Louisiana All Time, wether they won or lost and the year.
1967 Houston Loss
1948 Oklahoma State Win
1950 St Marys Tie
1931 USC Loss
1933 USC Loss
1960 USC Loss
1958 Texas Loss
1953 Texas A&M Win
So in thier ENTIRE History Georgia is 2-5-1 in regular season games West of Louisiana. Including 0-3-1 in California.
Every game played North of Kentucky in Georgias ENTIRE History
1965 Michigan Win
1957 Michigan Loss
1950 Boston College Win
1922 Chicago Loss
1944 Cincinnati Win
1940 Columbia Loss
1941 Columbia Win
1936 Fordham Tie
1921 Harvard Loss
1937 Holy Cross Loss
1938 Holy Cross Loss
1953 Maryland Loss
1916 Navy Loss
1928 New York Loss
1929 New York Win
1930 New York Win
1931 New York Loss
1939 New York Loss
1952 Penn Win
10 Games At Yale
Wins in '23, '24, '25, '26, '28
Losses in '27, '29, '30, '31, '33, '34
So in thier ENTIRE History Georgia is 12-17-1 North of Kentucky.
So in over 110 Year of football Georiga is
14-23-2
on the road outisde the South.
Jeremy don't forget Duke and Indiana, those 2 football powerhouses. :o))
Starting this year, Notre Dame gets the same BCS as every other school. The $14M contract ended.
Hey scott,
Make the fake PH55 stop using my name
As an independent, ND doesn't have to split its BCS game money with anyone - regardless of the amount.