I agree that the pods would be for football only and that Rutgers would be a better choice than Connecticut. My only quibble is I would switch Pitt and Rutgers in your pods. ND is worth that much to Pitt and vice versa. Also, Syracuse would likely have to play their games against ND in Yankee Stadium and when Rutgers hosts ND it will be in the Meadowlands.

I think the football-only pods should look like this:

Pod 1: Northeast Division
Boston College
Notre Dame
Pittsburgh
Syracuse

Pod 2: Mid-Atlantic Division
Maryland
Rutgers
Virginia
Virginia Tech

Pod 3: Carolina Division
Duke
North Carolina
North Carolina State
Wake Forest

Pod 4: Southeast Division
Clemson
Florida State
Georgia Tech
Miami

While most of the rest of the ACC would be required to play a nine game league schedule (depending on the mathematics of it all), I would only require ND to play a seven game league schedule - three against its permanent pod-mates and one full cycle through each of the other pods. So in year one, for the sake of illustration, their conference schedule might look like this:

BC, @ SU (NYC), Pitt, @ MIA, FSU, @ GT & CLEM.

That is a pretty attractive schedule.

Then they could do whatever they pleased with the other five games. I know that they have longstanding rivalries with Navy, Southern Cal, Michigan State, and Purdue and more modern rivalries with Michigan and Stanford. Some of those games would invariably fall by the wayside but that is a small price for the Irish to pay to not be locked into a longterm conference deal with a bunch of has been Catholic schools and a group of new faces from far off places.

Also, I would not be surprised to see the B1G react to this by trying to expand to destabilize the ACC.