But nearly all would have downsides as candidates to replace Haden, who's becoming athletics director at his alma mater USC after 12 seasons on NBC's games.

Jerome Bettis wasn't so great on-air before leaving NBC's NFL studio show. That ESPN's Bob Davie was fired as Notre Dame's coach would bring complications. ESPN's Mike Golic likely has too high a profile in his day job for ESPN to allow him to moonlight on NBC. Lou Holtz, with hours of live TV, might burn through gaffe-o-meters. The list goes on.

The best ND alumni prospect, for the only national college football TV package based around a single school, looks to be Joe Theismann. Theismann goes way back with the Irish faithful — changing the pronunciation of his last name to rhyme with Heisman before finishing second to Stanford's Jim Plunkett in the 1970 balloting — but also brings national credibility. He was a longtime ESPN NFL game analyst before being dropped from Monday Night Football in 2007.

Theismann then turned down ESPN's offer to work college games, saying he wanted to stay focused on the pros. He now appears on the NFL Network's Playbook Thursday studio show and last season got a cameo shot on an NBC NFL playoff game. But Theismann says he'd work this college football: "Sure I would. It's one thing doing college football, it's another to do Notre Dame football. … And Pat did a terrific job."

He did. And that was partly because Haden, who had worked as a TNT NFL game analyst and on CBS college football, wasn't an alumnus of a school lots of people supposedly love or hate — although seasons like last year, when the team went 6-6, have chipped away at Notre Dame's cachet. The versatile Charles Davis, who starred on Fox's BCS coverage and now works for the Big Ten Network and NFL Network, played his college ball at Tennessee — and would be an excellent outsider choice.

But Theismann would bring more star power to a TV package that needs it.