Welcome to the Audible, presented by Trader Joe's. I'm Stuart Mandel, joined as always by Bruce Feldman.

This is actually a bit of an emergency episode of The Audible. We weren't planning to record until Thursday morning.

And then Wednesday afternoon Pacific time, suddenly after months of waiting for some sort of clarity about what these conferences are planning to do this season,

we got at least one and possibly two back to back, which is funny, Bruce, because I'm looking at my phone,

it is currently 2.11 p.m. Pacific. And at 1252, less than an hour and a half ago, I texted you and said

that we might need to get a guest for tomorrow because things remain as cloudy as ever, and we can't go 45 minutes under the status of the season, that's for sure. Now we might just be able to do that with the ACC's news. We're going to bring on our colleague Matt Fortuna, who knows the ACC, and in particular, Notre Dame, very well.

I mean, I don't know about you, but the first thing that jumps out to me is, wow, Notre Dame is going to play for a conference championship for the first time in its entire history.

Yeah, I think the other thing was it seems to be quite a, I don't want to say concession.

Maybe that's the wrong word to use, but in terms of the money, because obviously Notre Dame with its home games on NBC to share that with everybody else is pretty significant. But obviously we're in uncharted waters with all this stuff going on, right?

Yeah, what choice do they have, I guess, is the question. They were left with all that, with the right yeah what choice do they have i guess is the question they

were left with all that with the big 10 and pack 12 going to conference only uh and with no guarantee

that the others won't do the same they needed a fallback and or they weren't going to have much of a

schedule and being a partial member of the ac, the ACC made it happen for them with some

concessions in return.

So for those who haven't seen the press release, the plan as of now, and with everything,

we have to say caveat, it's dependent on, let's see, what's the language they used.

If public health guidance allows, that's what they said.

If public health guidance allows, the ACC football season will begin the week of September

7th.

So that would be only a week later than when they were going to open.

It'll be, everybody will play 10 conference games plus one non-conference game.

The non-conference game has to be against an opponent in your own state

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