...it just isn't that high of a priority to me. The biggest upside would be if adding ND came as part of a move to a four-division approach that would allow us to play everyone in the league more often. But aside from that it seems unlikely to me that we would end up in ND's division and with the current scheduling approach we wouldn't play them any more often than we play FSU and Clemson.

In other words, we would play ND more often with our current arrangement than we would if they actually joined the conference.

The biggest problem we have with ND is that it's hard for us to add two teams and get to 16 teams (and 4x4 divisions) w/o them because if we add two other schools then we will have 17 for basketball.

The whole thing is tricky because of course a conference wants to add Notre Dame...but you don't want to be adding a diminished Notre Dame. It's basically a paradox. You want the ND brand, but the ND brand is in large part about their independence and uniqueness. Adding them to your conference is like driving a new car off the lot - it's immediately diminished in value.

I'm a fan of the current arrangement, but our scheduling situation sucks and will continue to suck unless and until we get to 4x4 divisions. (And those divisions can be notional. That is you could rotate them into two different 8-team divisions every year as needed to adhere to the rules. The point is it makes the scheduling easier.)