Choose your cliché.
Be careful what you wish for.
Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
FAFO.
Whatever you want to call it, the ACC will end up second-guessing its decision to pull down Notre Dame in order to lift up Miami’s chances at being included in the College Football Playoffs.
But I’m guessing as Pete Bevacqua continues to express Notre Dame’s grievances with regard to its league partner, the ACC probably already has some regrets.
Did the ACC’s continued social media push for the Hurricanes instead of the Irish or the ACC Network choosing to air the season-opener on a loop have any impact on the College Football Playoff Committee’s ultimate decision to choose Miami over Notre Dame?
It certainly put some additional pressure on the Committee, but if a social media campaign made the difference, the Committee is even more inept than is believed. And sure, Committee Chair Hunter Yurachek encouraged members to go re-watch the Notre Dame-Miami game from August, but I have to imagine they could have found a way to watch it even if the ACC Network hadn’t aired it more often than TBS will run A Christmas Story this month.
It reminds me of Patriots owner Robert Kraft asking Bill Belichick how much filming opposing teams’ signs helped New England on a scale of 1 to 100. Belichick reportedly responded, “1” and Kraft claimed he said, “Then, you’re a real schmuck.”
Maybe the ACC’s push helped more than 1, but the combined fines for the Patriots and Bill Belichick were less than $1 million.
The ACC may have a lot more than that at stake.
“The ACC is important to us and we're important to the ACC,” Bevacqua said during a press conference on Tuesday. “Think about football for a minute. Those ACC teams want to play us in football.
“Interesting stat, since 2014, when we started our football relationship with the ACC, if you look at stadiums, ACC games sell out roughly 23 percent of the time. When Notre Dame goes to an ACC site, it's 90 percent of the time. When you think about ratings for ACC football games when they play Notre Dame, there's a tremendous lift.
“I don't understand why you would go on a social media campaign to attack an important partner. Who are some of our important partners in the football space? NBC. We wouldn't do that to NBC.”
Notre Dame has certainly been a good ACC partner and it goes back further than the current financial boost the program provides the league schools annually.
Notre Dame jumped into the league for one season during COVID in 2020, an instrumental move when it was unclear if the ACC or any teams would play football that fall.
When the ACC was scrambling during the most recent conference realignment, Notre Dame helped the league add Stanford and Cal as it scrambled to stay competitive.
Bevacqua has made it clear his biggest beef is with the process that gave Notre Dame every reason to believe it would be included in the Playoff only to have the door slammed in its face in the end.
But while that’s been the primary target of his ire, the ACC seems more than a secondary target.
It’s clear - because Bevacqua has gone way out of his way to make it so - that Notre Dame was both hurt and shocked by the ACC’s actions.
“I saw the first social media post and my gut reaction was that somebody in their social media department got over their skis and did something that the ACC was going to correct,” Bevacqua explained. “Quite frankly, I was kind of expecting a phone call saying, ‘Hey, sorry about that, it won't happen again.’
“But then it did happen again.”
Bevacqua has called the damage the ACC did to its relationship “permanent.”
“Are we looking for an apology?” Bevacqua asked rhetorically. “To be quite frank, I don't think an apology does anything or unwinds what has happened. At the right time, we'll sit down with the ACC leadership and I think have hopefully a very frank, honest, hopefully productive conversation.
“But I would tell you that time's not now.”
Whenever that time comes, ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips will probably want to find a way to walk back his lie in a statement Monday that read, “At no time was it suggested by the ACC that Notre Dame was not a worthy candidate for inclusion in the field.”
“We were definitely being targeted,” Bevacqua countered on Tuesday, although he didn’t need to make an argument as the social media posts remain there for all to see in black and white that the ACC was very much downgrading Notre Dame’s worthiness as a playoff team.
Bevacqua acknowledged Notre Dame’s relationship with the league is different than the other full-member institutions, but repeated his confusion about why it was targeted.
“Again, the ACC does wonderful things for Notre Dame, but we bring tremendous football value to the ACC,” he added. “We didn't understand why you would go out of your way to try to damage us in this process.”
He hasn’t made any threats or even provided any hints about what Notre Dame may do, but Bevacqua has also been given plenty of opportunities to dismiss some of the most drastic of measures and has declined to do so.
“We haven't really given all of that a ton of thought,” he said when asked to elaborate regarding potential next steps.
What’s next and when that could come remains unknown, but one thing he has made clear again and again is that the relationship has been damaged.
“I'm not going to shy away from that and that's just not me speaking. People a lot more important at this University than me feel the same way. I think it has done some real damage and I think the ACC knows that.”
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