ACC Basketball: Best realignment scenarios for each team if conference breaks up

Notre Dame

With their football program happily independent, the options for the Fighting Irish are quite unique. First and foremost, they could choose to return to the Big East that they left in 2013 when the conference restructured and reformed. Notre Dame wouldn’t need the league to have a football program and would give the conference a second basketball program in the rich state of Indiana, with Butler not exactly pulling their weight in the conference in recent years.

On the other hand, there has already been speculation of a potential marriage between Notre Dame and the Big Ten. The Fighting Irish already have rivalries with a number of Big Ten teams in football and fit right in the middle of the conference’s footprint. They already play schools like Michigan, Ohio State, and USC regularly and would fit like a glove in the league. Their location would also give the conference another team (somewhat) near Chicago and a third in the state of Indiana.

Ten years ago, Notre Dame chose to join the ACC right around when the Big East restructured itself, choosing the best conference for its athletics at the time. This isn’t to say that a return to the Big East is a bad move, but heading to the Big Ten makes a lot of sense for the Fighting Irish. They’d join a group of like-minded schools, have rivalries with those aforementioned schools, and would likely still have a chance to be independent in football. The move checks off a lot of potential boxes in South Bend.