Though Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said the school didn't necessarily factor football recruiting into its decision to align with the ACC, it's a welcome byproduct for Kelly. Under the scheduling agreement that begins next season, Notre Dame will play five games against ACC opponents, which means future schedules will feature more games in Florida, North Carolina and Atlanta and fewer in Michigan and the Midwest. Kelly even mentioned recently that he'd like to start a series with Georgia, which he acknowledged was for recruiting reasons.
"The geography was really important to us," Swarbrick said. "This is a national school and the fact that the ACC would take us to Boston and Miami and Atlanta, the Carolinas – we'll manage in the Midwest on our own and the relationship with Chicago – we love the footprint of it. We work hard not to be regionalized and the scope of that conference, we're going to play Syracuse in the Meadowlands and be in Boston and Atlanta."
The next frontier, so to speak, is whether Notre Dame can make an impact in the deep South, as opposed to the Atlantic South. Though that area will never be quite as fertile for the Irish, their first verbal commitment in 2015 is offensive lineman Jerry Tillery from Evangel Christian in Shreveport, La., one of the region's most powerful high school programs.
If Notre Dame continues the trajectory it established last year, when it went 12-1 and reached the championship game, more of those successes might be possible.
"We're not going to dismantle LSU on their home turf, but we have to have a presence if we're going to play for national championships," Kelly said. "We can't be looked at in Louisiana as though, 'They're not even here.' If there's a kid in Louisiana who fits the Notre Dame profile, we better know about them and have a shot at them."
