Notre Dame Football: 3 reasons Irish will never make playoff as Independent

2. No backing of a conference

Notre Dame has been Independent since before I was born and I know fans, boosters and higher-ranking members of the Fighting Irish program would have it no other way. In this day and age, being an Independent has its pitfalls, though. You see teams like BYU, Army and UMass still fight the battle, but besides Notre Dame, the only school that gets some respect as an Independent is BYU.

The major positives for Notre Dame is it doesn’t have to split money with anybody and with it being a major university, it has very lucrative television and shoe deals, which a lot of schools would kill for.

The negatives for Notre Dame is they have no conference backing on the football side, unlike the other sports with the school which are in the ACC. And while the football team plays a lot of ACC teams, when it’s all said and done, they don’t have the luxury to win a conference or to play in a conference championship game.

Winning a conference or playing in a championship game holds a lot of weight especially when you have the talent to play in the College Football Playoff. If you have one or two losses (especially two losses) being able to defeat a quality team in your conference championship game helps a lot of teams get over the hump.

Notre Dame has to be almost perfect and can’t score late year brownie points of the conference championship, it may have to look into getting this fixed if it ever wants to make the College Football Playoff.