Schools Are Reportedly Trying To Freeze Notre Dame Out of Future Scheduling Opportunities After Finding Out About the Irish's Deal With the CFP Starting Next Year

This week is the first time I've ever felt like we may actually be able to force Notre Dame to join a conference. It took the rest of college football 100 years or so to realize this, but Notre Dame needs the other 68 Power Four schools much more than they need it.

ND athletic director Pete Bevacqua has been on a media tear this week, decrying the injustice that was the Fighting Irish being left out of the College Football Playoff in favor of a team that beat them and finished with the same record. He's also apparently very upset that team's conference was lobbying for its own member to get in over Notre Dame, a school which has insisted upon remaining independent for decades.

Do you think they should be rooting for you, dude? You can be mad you got left out, but saying Notre Dame has been "targeted" because a league office wanted its actual, full-time member institution to get a Playoff bid is insanity.

And amidst all this is the report that ND has somehow struck a deal with the CFP which states that the Irish will be automatically granted a Playoff spot if they're ranked in the Top 12 of the committee's final rankings. Had that been in place this year, Notre Dame would have gotten the final at-large bid over Miami, despite the Hurricanes being ranked higher and deemed to be the better team.

So it seems athletic directors across the country are finally waking up to the fact that they're in a no-win situation with these petulant assholes. Even if you beat them going forward, it's still not going to do you any good if it comes down to your school and Notre Dame at the end of the season because it has a get out of jail free card in its back pocket courtesy of the CFP.

So just stop playing them.

The CFP committee has made it abundantly clear it will do everything in its power to make sure ND has a spot going forward. Part of why Bevacqua is so upset at how this whole thing went down is that the committee said Notre Dame was better than Miami for weeks until it became simply untenable to give the final spot to the Irish over a team that beat them and the CFP was left with no choice.

But now that everyone's aware of this little side deal, there's no reason for any power conference team to play Notre Dame as things stand now. If ND is hellbent on remaining independent and playing games on NBC like it's 1956, that's great. But this is the first time it seems like there's a real chance everyone has finally had enough and will put some pressure on these guys to join a conference like everyone else.

Having one program in the country that gets to go through every season saying, "Heads I win, tails you lose," doesn't make any sense. You are no longer God's gift to college football.