it definitely is, then I think it would actually harm interest in their primary sport to leave the Big East for the ACC, particularly an ACC that has lost its best football brands, and schools leaving is the only way I see the window opening for UConn to get an invite. As the CFP continues to balloon, either to 16, or 24, or however many teams, ND further and further loses any incentive they currently have to join a conference. In a 24 team CFP structure, which is, for better or worse, clearly where we're going, because it's the model that generates the most content and revenue, ND will be in the field basically every year. Why would they ever choose to join a conference under those circumstances, and water down your own influence? I don't think ND will ever be a "leader" in the ACC - to ND, the ACC is little more than a place to park its basketball and non-rev sports. To the extent the ACC ever becomes more of an inconvenience to ND than its worth, it would take approximately 10 minutes worth of phone calls for ND to move those sports and park them in the Big East. And, people can say what they want to about the difficulties of building ND's football schedule independently - it's not difficult. The USC situation was an isolated case. It would take about another 10 minutes worth of phone calls for ND to establish three different scheduling agreements with the Big 10, SEC, and Big 12 if it decides it no longer wants to do business with the ACC. It continues to be my opinion that the SEC and Big 10 (especially the Big 10) are already way too big, with more content than their broadcast partners actually want or can actually use. The vast majority of the content, even football, ends up buried on streaming-only, so why does anyone think they're going to be looking for even more? And that's before you take into account that additional members equates to additional losses that someone has to eat each and every Saturday. If we're going to continue doing the separate conferences paradigm, and there's no reason to believe we won't, then there's no reason for the Big 10 or SEC to further expand - there's no additional value in it. This is why my opinion has turned to and remains that the next realignments will not be further expansion of the P2, but are going to be the creation of new conferences to allow for further consolidation of football brands while also trimming the dead weight. The only other way forward that makes sense would be to blow up the conference paradigm altogether, at least for football.