1) Regarding Notre Dame - Notre Dame isn't and never has been a member of the conference for football. They are only affiliated with the ACC insofar as they can exploit it while offering little to nothing in return. Accordingly, they would not be scheduled as a conference opponent in this thing we've made up for fun. Also, in a real world context, my inclination is that the "why marry the cow when you get the milk for free" relationship between Notre Dame and the ACC is not going to be a thing in ~5 years or so - unless you're living in the Land of Make-Believe, it's pretty obvious that the ACC is going to take a major hit sometime before 2030, there will no longer be any ACC-football scheduling value for ND to exploit, and I imagine Notre Dame will want to park its basketball and olympic sports elsewhere, likely the Big East, where they can play other Catholic schools in major metros. 2) Regarding home vs. away scheduling being on a two year cycle - Don't care. Boo hoo, if you don't win games and either stay in the best tier or move up, you never get to play the highest value teams at home. That's just the way it has to be in our little thing we've made up for fun. The entire idea behind this is not to please an athletic director, or make sure programs get good home schedules, it's to create compelling football content for media partners to sell to casual viewers. You want a better home schedule next year? Then beat the crappy teams on your schedule this year. The teams that win games get the highest profile teams on their schedule home and away, the teams that lose games don't - you play slop, because you are slop. Is it entirely, 100% fair? No, not really. But neither is the current setup. Win and prosper, lose and suffer. Keep moving forward and reap the benefits, stagnate and get nowhere, or lose and face the consequences. Those are the stakes, that's what makes it compelling. 3) Regarding rivalries - see 2 above. You want to play your rival, but you're in a different tier? Sorry, princess, you're going to have to win your way up and EARN the right. There's no crying about anything in this league. Yes, it's brutal, but everyone also has some attainable goal to play for and work towards. Right now, there are plenty of ACC teams that begin every season with zero chance to accomplish anything at all whatsoever, and, accordingly, nobody cares about or watches them. It's also a TV-first league, so I don't want to hear AD's crying about selling tickets. This isn't D3 or FCS. If you can manage to create TV hype, in-person attendance will always follow. At this level, the TV hype has to come first. Yes, this all sounds revolutionary and iconoclastic, but it is. This is also little more than a thought exercise, because it will never happen. I can tell you one thing - doing things the same way they've been done for 50+ years sure isn't working for the ACC or the Big 12 - they've been pantsed in entirely embarrassing fashion by the SEC and Big 10, and treated like dog crap by their media partners.