Kevin White has lost his damn mind

I'm sure there's a planet on which it makes sense to schedule a college football game between a team from Indiana and a team from Washington 2000 miles from either campus (and in the case of WSU, from any concentration of alumni/fans), but that planet isn't Earth. The first officially contracted "1" of the "7-4-1" candyassed schedule model, ND will be playing Washington State in the Alamo Dome. And the 400 ND alumni who live in San Antonio will likely want to go to the game. Maybe a few thousand other people who live in the area. As for the alumni... I can't imagine there will be any kind of great demand to go see this game. I for one seldom bother with any road game more than 100 miles from my house, and those have tended to be just an excuse to visit a friend who lived in the area around the game site. ND can easily sell out our home stadium, because large numbers of alumni want to return a few times a year. We tend to sell out games when we're the visitors(in fact, in most cases, people are forced to buy tickets to games they don't want in order to get into an ND game), because the other team's fans believe we're a marquee matchup.

This brings us to playing WSU in San Antonio- who wants to go to this game? Alumni? Well, not really, they want to go to the games that are at ND. And a few want to go to games that are near(easy enough to drive out and back in a weekend) their houses. If the venue is a place that's otherwise a tourist destination, that would also help the draw as Domers would fly in for a week at a time in many cases. San Antonio, while I'm sure it's a nice city, doesn't quite fit the bill. Will Washington State fans go? My guess is that there are about 12 of those in the state of Texas. And the rest are in Washington, and likely don't feel like blowing the cash for the airfare to fly to Texas for a regular season game. Texans? Well, they're all going to be watching UT or TAMU (or in some cases, Oklahoma) that day.

All that said, at least it's an opponent that's fairly solidly in the middle of a BCS conference, as opposed to the quality of opponent that normally is expected to make a one off game(and despite the neutral site, this is, for revenue purposes, a home game, with ND taking the gate and TV money, and WSU getting an appearance fee). I was fully convinced prior to this announcement that any game in Tejas was going to be against Baylor or Rice or SMU, or some other team I'd expect us to beat by 50. At least I only expect to beat WSU by 20, which is a step in the right direction from the candyassed nancyboy approach we've been hearing from the Athletic Department as the goal of their scheduling. My theory is this: As long as the team is as good as it should be, regardless of how hard the schedule is, it's going to be an easy schedule.