The News & Observer reported that the school avoided paying the University of Louisville $450,000 for opting out of three football games. Duke lawyers essentially had argued that the Blue Devils were so bad any Division I team could have replaced them on the Cardinals' schedule.

Louisville's breach of contract suit, filed in Franklin County (Ky.) Circuit Court, was dismissed by Judge Phillip J. Shepherd on Thursday. The contract had called for a penalty of $150,000 per game to be assessed if a date with a "team of similar stature" could not be scheduled in the event of a cancellation.

According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, the judge's summary included the following:

"At oral argument, Duke (with a candor perhaps more attributable to good legal strategy than to institutional modesty) persuasively asserted that this is a threshold that could not be any lower."

Duke has gone 13-90 over the last nine seasons and beat only Northwestern en route to a 1-11 mark and winless ACC campaign last year.

The teams, which played in 2002, were slated to face each other last season, this season and in 2009. Louisville played nonconference games last season against Championship Subdivision Murray State, Middle Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina State and Syracuse.

The traveling home game will give NBC eight Fighting Irish broadcasts a season and push its payments - which are never publicly disclosed but are believed to provide Notre Dame with much more TV cash than any other football program - much higher than the current deal, which will end in 2010. NBC will benefit from selling the advertising time for the off-site games at potentially higher prices because they will be the only prime-time home games played by Notre Dame, which will not stage them in South Bend.

Not a bad deal for a program that went 3-9 last season.