No excuses at all for Aoki, because if IU and, especially, Oregon State can have some success, there is no reason that ND cannot, but this is a damn difficult conference now. It is comparable to the SEC and PAC 12 (ranks ahead of the PAC 12 in RPI right now, for that matter) and Big XII. It's definitely the best baseball conference ND has ever been in, and really, that should be a selling point when recruiting against Michigan and IU and virtually every other Midwestern and East Coast program.

An elite program with which I am familiar - Louisville - absolutely feasts off good Midwestern recruits (McDonnell basically sweeps the Midwest for almost all of his good players). This isn't football, and there are a lot of good prospects to be found in Illinois and Indiana and Pennsylvania and Michigan and Ohio; take a look at the origins of Louisville's bevy of draft prospects from the last decade - a few are from Kentucky but most are from the Midwest. Tuition is a problem, but that can be overcome with the right support.

3 more are from nearby. Louisville has always been a baseball town since back before Mr. Hillerich carved that first bat for Pete Browning. Louisville was also once a major league franchise and might still be today except for politics.

Using the "Northern" excuse is getting old.
These northern schools (north of the Ohio River) made the tourney:
Oregon St
Holy Cross
Yale
Nebraska
St. Johns
Delaware
Illinois-Chicago
Michigan
Iowa
Indiana
Ohio
Xavier
Oral Roberts
Marist
Central Connecticut State

Granted, many made it because their conferences are much weaker than the ACC, but can we actually argue we should have been in the tourney ahead of these teams?

Your Louisville example is great - while not really a "northern" team, they aren't a really a southern team either. If Notre Dame had McDonnell, I think we would have close to the same success as he is having at UofL.
Of course McDonnell was the highest paid baseball coach in the NCAA (UF passed this with O'Sullivan's contract last year), so would ND actually come up with the $$$ for the right coach?

12-17, 9-21, 13-15 and 14-16. His NCAA regional year at BC was a 34-26 overall record.

He also never had a winning record in Ivy League play at Columbia. Over 5 years his best year was 10-10.

So, I don't know. Is it Aoki or ND? Or both.

Barring a change in programmatic approach. The big east was about right for what ND puts into baseball and what kind of programs they were competing against. ND joined ACC and didn't alter how they do things...went from having competitive advantage in overall talent and facilities as well as tradition with similar weather and pool of prospects to a large step up in talent/ depth and huge competitive disadvantage in terms of facilities/weather/tradition/ cost of attendance, etc. So looking at how the ND program is-- irrespective of the coach, unless they make the conscious decision to upgrade facility/ environment/ aid, etc, I expect them to hover around the low middle/ bottom of the ACC for the foreseeable future

level for ND, given its level of support for baseball. This has been true for a number of ND programs once they were exposed to ACC competition after having succeeded easily at times in the Big East.

any other programs that that is true of.

swimming teams, and men's golf are finding it tougher to win in the ACC than they did in the Big East. The hope, of course, is that they will eventually rise to the competition.

...women's tennis is suffering from a general decline in the program not a move to the ACC. 10 years ago they were a perennial Sweet 16 team and at their peak a Final Four team. They could compete with the class of the ACC back then. Jay Louderback did an amazing job building that program, but it's time for some new blood.

That also seems a bizarre way to characterize women's soccer given that it was a national powerhouse.

at home to SIU-Edwardsville. The previous year the team was shutout in the second round by former Big East foe, Connecticut. National powerhouses don't lose that early in the post-season and recruiting seems to be less effective than it was before joining the ACC. Adding Nate Norman to the coaching staff should help all aspects of the program.

...not "we're as good as we've always been it's just that we're in a new conference where it's harder to win."

Particularly because of the numbers and depth needed to compete over the grind of the season...more so a baseball because of numbers of pitchers required for the course of the season

are right where we were before. Make the NCAA and don't make the super regionals. 22 years in a row now.

Think about how hard it is to do one without the other over 2 decades. You were NEVER the better/best team just one time? Never? Yet, you were good enough to get there. It's baffling how that could occur again and again and again and again. Even more baffling is how the NCAA committee never shut you out after all that failure. You'd think the track record of failure was clear.

dominated by California, Texas, and the SE where you can play outdoors year round and where you won't hurt your arm pitching too much in the cold. It takes incredible effort to recruit to a Northern school when a kid could go to a warm weather school especially when talking about state schools who can give free rides to in state students w/o putting them on scholarships using state lottery monies like South Carolina and Georgia have and using scholarship money to give larger percentage scholarships to out of state students. Whereas at a private school they must divide the 11 scholarship among 25+ players and the remaining costs are still high unless they qualify for a lot of financial aid due to need.

you keep making excuses, ignoring the success that Pat Murphy and Paul Manieri had at Notre Dame, and we'll keep getting the sorry performances we've been getting recently.

Maybe climate change had something to do with the fact that Murphy and Manieri could produce sustained excellence in Northern Indiana while Aoki can't possibly do any better than the crap we've seen.

Notre Dame -- athletically and otherwise -- has achieved greatness in spite of great obstacles.

holds water anymore across the board. These sports certainly have a majority of teams competing at high levels from the west and south; however, we are beginning to see big ten teams make a dent. I don't believe the excuse holds in regards to the weather. The Minnesota softball team won 55 games I believe and took Alabama to the wire in two NCAA tournament games.

All time, 9/70 CWS and 1/35 CWWS winners are from "cold weather" schools. It is a major disadvantage.

...wise. But nor is it South Beach.

And why ND did fine in big east and not so fine in ACC...at least that's a big part of it

I don't really follow softball so I guess I shouldn't speculate;
They tend to only use a couple pitchers though

regarded pitchers. und.com just posted an article about them today.

The current staff has not proven they can develop elite pitching. This lack of competence also extends to the softball off season conditioning. It takes strong legs and endurance to be an elite pitcher, something not found in Notre Dame pitchers.