There’s some buzz out there ahead of Thursday’s Orange Bowl, stemming from James Franklin pregame quotes:

There’s a bunch of this out there, Notre Dame fans and other neutrals claiming that this is some sort of bulletin board material because Franklin thinks everybody should be in a conference. He’s talking about uniformity in college football, and streamlining the schedules and the calendar to make everything more consistent, which would, in turn, make it easier to decide who gets into the College Football Playoff and how those teams are seeded.

Here’s a snippet from Adam Rittenberg at ESPN:

“It should be consistent across college football,” Franklin said. “This is no knock at [Marcus Freeman] or Notre Dame, but I think everybody should be in a conference. I think everybody should play a conference championship game, or nobody should play a conference championship game. I think everybody should play the same number of conference games.”

Penn State reached the CFP by playing nine conference games as well as the Big Ten championship against No. 1 Oregon, which defeated the Nittany Lions 45-37 on Dec. 7. The Big 12 also has maintained a nine-game league slate, while the SEC and ACC have stayed at eight conference games.

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Franklin also highlighted other areas of the sport that could be made more uniform, including starting the season a week earlier to ease the strain of playing more games with an expanded playoff. He reiterated his desire to appoint a college football commissioner unaffiliated with a school or a conference, and once again mentioned longtime coach and current ESPN analyst Nick Saban as an option, along with former Washington and Boise State coach Chris Petersen, now a FOX college football analyst, and Dave Clawson, who recently stepped down as Wake Forest’s coach.

“We need somebody that is looking at it from a big picture perspective,” Franklin said.

For added context, when the CFP was expanded, Notre Dame agreed that it could not be seeded any higher than 5th. That’s the price of not joining a conference, the forfeiture of a first-round bye. Since they don’t play a conference championship game, they can’t go into the top four as a conference winner. Those spots were won this year by Oregon, Georgia, Boise State, and Arizona State. So while it’s normally the case that Notre Dame wants to have the cake, and eat it too, they capitulated on this in order to protect their independent status.

Still, it amounts to one set of rules for Notre Dame, and a different set of rules for everyone else, and all Franklin is suggesting is that we rationalize and organize so that we’re not having to decide, for instance, if an 11-1 independent should be seeded higher or lower than an 11-2 team that lost a conference title game. And the college football commissioner is a great idea. Saban would be a fine choice, as would Chris Petersen. There are obvious ways to make things more consistent across the board, and if Notre Dame disagrees, so be it, but Franklin wasn’t being a dickhead here. He usually is a dickhead, but this time he was not. Plus, these players don’t need any bulletin board material anyway. “Oh no, the opposing coach said we should join a conference, we’re gonna show him!” It’s the CFP semifinal. If they’re not motivated to play this game, then they’re dead inside.