Late Wednesday afternoon the ACC announced a 10-game conference schedule for the 15 member schools - including the Notre Dame Fighting Irish - which, it hopes, will allow its teams to play football for the 2020 season. It’s not the double round-robin format which was previously floated by some sports writers, but 10 unique games for each team. Furthermore, although the league did away with the geographically-challenged Atlantic and Coastal divisions, this schedule isn’t based on geographic pods either... or is it?
A close examination of the actual schedule for ACC football reveals an underlying structure - three pods of uneven size but roughly geographic:
North (five teams): Boston College, Syracuse, Pitt, Notre Dame, Louisville
Central (six teams): Virginia, Virginia Tech, Duke, North Carolina, NC State, Wake Forest
South (four teams): Clemson, Georgia Tech, Florida State, Miami
Within each of these imaginary pods the teams are, in fact, playing a full round-robin.