As Notre Dame teeters on the brink of being eligible for the Midwest's great Holiday tradition - the Pizza Bowl at the home of the Detroit Lions - it is again time to consider whether the Irish should just bite the bullet and join a conference.

Unless the goal is to remain a curious and affectionate academic anomaly like the service academies, the competitive reasoning for Notre Dame to retain "Independent" status and hope to ever be a championship team again is now wafer-thin. Navy and Army have a national following, and everybody loves them too. But they don't have a bazillion-dollar TV deal with NBC because there's not enough happening on the bottom line to justify it. And it seems hard to fathom how what Notre Dame is doing on the field will keep the eyeballs tuning in to continue watching the train wreck every season.

The time to jump to the safety of a conference is now. The evidence is overwhelming. Consider...

As is well known, their last national title was during the Reagan administration (1988) and they've only had one other since Jimmy Carter was in office (1977.)

But it's worse than that if you just bump it back one more year and one more President. From the end of the Ford Administration (1976) to today, Notre Dame has amassed just 8 seasons with 10 or more victories. How does this stack up against the other football programs with pretentions to national greatness and big seasons to back it up?

• Florida State and Nebraska each have 18 seasons during that time period with 10 or more wins.
• Oklahoma is next with 15 seasons in double-digits or more.
• Five schools can sport 14 such seasons: Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State, Texas, and Miami-FL.
• Technically, Boise State did it 14 times as well, but not all of those were during the period when the Broncos were Division 1A. But this hardly matters: they've won 10 or more games 8 times just since 1999!
• Florida has had a dozen seasons since 1976 with 10 or better wins.
• Main Irish rival Southern Cal has done it 11 times, and so has comparatively new upstart ACC power Virginia Tech.
• Two marginal second-tier teams in their respective conferences (Texas A&M and Washington) have - like Notre Dame - each done the trick 8 times.
• LSU, Iowa, Kansas State and TCU all check in right behind at 7 double-digit winning seasons. (And TCU has done all seven just since 2000, so like Boise State, expect them to move up fast.)

That's at least 18 teams - fully 15 percent of the big-time college football universe - at least matching or substantially eclipsing what Touchdown Jesus has been watching over the last 33 seasons when it comes to a football program putting up wins that should be considered in a top-10 ranking conversation. The evidence is in that this is not really much of a top-20 program anymore. A number of the schools noted above have come from comparatively nowhere relatively fast to pass the Irish by with more big seasons, and now deserve more benefit of doubt in the rankings when they win lots of games: TCU, Boise State, Kansas State, Virginia Tech.

And, of course, the situation seems to be deteriorating even more of late. The worst Notre Dame season in more than 40 years ended less than 24 months ago.

So, the question isn't so much whether to join a conference, but when and which one. Three important criteria should guide the decision:

• Regional affiliation: South Bend is in the heart of the Midwest and that is where Notre Dame should play its seasons.
• Balance and room to add: Ideally, the perfect conference should have an uneven number of teams, so adding Notre Dame will evenly balance out a pair of divisions and make conference title game planning easier.
• Proper appreciation for Notre Dame: As noted above, there are now many conferences with many teams that have comparable or much better history over the last few decades in comparison. Not just anybody will properly respect and appreciate what they are gaining by adding Notre Dame, and the Irish doubtlessly want nothing to do with any situation where such respect is not forthcoming.

There is only one situation that meets all this criteria. The West Division of the Mid-American Conference has just six teams, while the East Division has seven. If Notre Dame can get an invite to the Pizza Bowl, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.