The Michigan-Notre Dame rivalry’s ending, but there’s a bright side for fans

Saturday night in South Bend, Michigan and Notre Dame will play their last game for the foreseeable future (7:30 p.m. ET, NBC), with their 41-game series scheduled to end for no clear reason. There is a good chance that you won’t watch it, because college football is an unruly kingdom run by rival warlords and therefore, Michigan-Notre Dame is on in the same time slot as Michigan State-Oregon and Virginia Tech-Ohio State.

However, you might consider tuning in, at least when it gets late, because few rivalries have produced more great finishes per installment. Since the rivalry restarted in 1978, it has produced the following:

The teams have played 30 times since 1978. Thirteen of those games have featured memorable, last-minute dramatics. 20 of the games have been decided by one score. Michigan leads the modern series by a single game: 15-14-1.

And naturally, because college football is what it has become, the series is going to end so Notre Dame can be a half-pregnant member of the ACC. Because why would we want to see more editions of a series that made Reggie Ho and Remy Hamilton household names in the Midwest when we can get Notre Dame against Tobacco Road?

And Michigan is hardly better, as it will be playing a steady diet of games against Maryland and Rutgers in place of games against traditional Big Ten opponents, because the Big Ten’s expansion driven solely by adding cable subscribers who are vaguely aware of the existence of college football.

This piece was going to be a lament about the way that college football is losing many of the rivalries that made the sport great, with Michigan-Notre Dame being an (admittedly newer) addition to the list that includes Pitt-West Virginia, Texas-Texas A&M, and Kansas-Missouri. And then I remembered a moment of clarity that I had last month.

I took a business trip to Knoxville, where I walked to Neyland Stadium. I meandered through campus, eventually finding that massive structure. Standing on the edge of the Tennessee River, looking up at the imposing stadium on a bluff, I was struck by an overpowering thought: my favorite sport is stupid.

I am a fan of Michigan, the second-winningest program in college football history. Tennessee is the ninth-winningest program in college football history. In other words, the Wolverines and Vols are both college football royalty. The schools are separated by 500 miles, a straight shot up I-75. And yet they have never played, save for one less-than-memorable meeting in Orlando in which Tennessee took out its frustrations on blowing a national title shot by pummeling a collapsing Michigan team in the Citrus Bowl. We’ve never heard “The Victors” at Neyland Stadium or “Rocky Top” at the Big House.

Michigan has never played a regular season game at an actual college football stadium (as in, not Jerry World) against Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, LSU, Auburn, Florida, Arizona State, or Virginia Tech. Add in Tennessee and you have 45 percent of the historical top 20. In addition to Michigan, Tennessee has never played a regular season game against Texas, Oklahoma (a failing that is mere weeks from being remedied), Ohio State, Nebraska, Washington, and Arizona State. That is 35 percent of the historical top 20.

No other sport is like this. NBA teams all play one another during the regular season. MLB and the NFL rotate schedules such that teams will play every other team in the league within a certain period of time. Even European soccer, a sport with regional ties like college football, has a structure in place whereby the elite teams have all generally visited one another in the Champions League.

So we gripe about the end of rivalries. But the end of rivalries frees up space for our teams to schedule games against marquee non-conference opponents. This is, in fact, what Michigan has done, as the Wolverines have home-and-homes on deck with Virginia Tech, Arkansas, Washington, and Oklahoma, while Notre Dame has just added Ohio State to its future, which already includes Georgia, Texas, and others.

The fear is that Michigan will not replace Notre Dame with interesting non-conference opponents, but will instead put forward a schedule that contains neither tradition nor progress. The early signs -- the games scheduled against name brand opponents -- reflect that those fears are misplaced.

I have no faith that elite programs are going to schedule one another because of the College Football Playoff selection committee, as that conclusion would require a belief that this new group of humans will be able to achieve what all prior sets of humans voting in polls could not, which is understanding that an 11-1 or even a 10-2 team can be better and more deserving than a 12-0 team.

I do, however, have faith in self-interest. If attendance continues to decline and athletic departments are forced to fight a losing battle against high-definition televisions and home WiFi, then one obvious solution would be to schedule more attractive opponents.

And in the end, we may end up with sections of maize amid a sea of orange on a fall Saturday in Tennessee.