I think changes have been a-foot around ND for some time, and they are not yet at a stopping place. The athletics department model to which the University of Notre Dame aspires is that not of a Catholic school football factory, in which the football team not only has total control of the athletics department but also key aspects of the university as a whole. The model to which the university aspires is that in which various sports matter a great deal and football serves a primary purpose to advance the entire athletics department. It is the old east coast idea.
ND is never going to turn back in, say, lacrosse. The team sport that most loudly screams 'Elite schools which may or may nor even play D1 football' is lacrosse, with nothing remotely close. Top lacrosse programs, and the 5 in the ACC are all among the 10 or 12 most important in the sport, are thrilled to hobnob with the Ivy League and the Service Academies. It is like a throwback to the days before football became about football factories. Even the plodding Big Ten understands the value of lacrosse and added Johns Hopkins for that 1 sport so it could meet NCAA standards to receive an auto bid to the national tournament (no school in the BT made this year's tournament).
If there is ever an issue at ND in which the football program gets lined up against the other sports, the football program will lose. That is because those who run the university do not intend to allow even Irish football to be the cart leading the horse as they finish the plan to make ND the full peer of Duke and UVA rather than the full peer of Ohio St and Florida.
ND fans who wish to keep thinking Irish football gives marching orders to the university will keep telling themselves that the move into the ACC was primarily because it made ND football happy. It made the most insightful ND football people happy, but they are a minority. The rest had to be told behind the scenes to bite their tongues and accept 5/8ths membership in ACC football because their preferred days of independence were as dead as the days when their fathers and grandfathers swore ND would never play in bowls.
ND sports would have been perfectly fine in the newest BE, which would have meant ND football remained truly independent. But ND chose to give up football independence, to become a 5/8ths member of ACC football, because being in the ACC was the ideal fit for the other sports and for the university as a whole.
