Notre Dame's independence may be meeting the "death by a thousand paper cuts". They have a scheduling alliance with the Big East, but the Big East is slowly adopting the CUSA one team at a time. Now that Memphis is joining the Big East, that brings the conference's number of former CUSA teams to 9. So Notre Dame surely must be asking themselves "who are these teams we're obligated to be playing now?" They signed that Big East deal to play Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Boston College, etc. Those teams are gone. Now the Pac 12 and Big Ten have a scheduling alliance. It's possibly, not likely but possible, that ND could look up one day and accept that they need to join a conference, and that move would be a game changer for other conferences because whichever one brings them into their club picks up one of the biggest name brands in the game.
