Starting in 1915, freshmen at Georgia Tech were required to wear a RAT hat while on campus to signify their lowly status as a Recently Acquired Tech student.

Unless their football team beat rival Georgia, they had to wait until the end of spring quarter to ditch the beanies.

Failure to adhere to the rule could subject the violator to some form of mild hazing by an upperclassman.

The practice became antiquated over the years and was eventually phased out sometime around the 1980s.

That’s the thing about traditions.

They might be near and dear to the hearts of some and they’re hard to give up. Especially those that have a $25-plus million television contract attached to them. But continuing them doesn’t always make sense amid the change of times, circumstances and social norms.

Which brings us to Notre Dame football.

While virtually everyone else of consequence in the sport has long since pledged allegiance to a conference – or in some cases, 2 or 3 – the Irish cling tightly and proudly to their independent football status that has been their identity since the days of Rockne and The Gipper.

They’re able to do so because of the aforementioned cash flow provided by NBC, nostalgia and the generosity/desperation of the ACC to help with scheduling.

Independence, however, is an outdated concept when it comes to the current structure of college football. It’s only going to become more pronounced in the coming years after the College Football Playoff expands to 12 teams with automatic bids going to the top 6 conference champions.

That’s why everyone is already getting in line to court the Irish once they finally come to grips with reality and decide that their long-standing independent tradition has outlived its usefulness.

No one is fighting harder to get at the front of that line than the ACC, where the Irish already are members in the other sports.

“If there comes a time that Notre Dame would consider moving to a conference away from independence, I feel really good about it being the ACC,” commissioner Jim Phillips said at the league’s preseason football kickoff event in July.

“They know how we feel. They know that we would love to have them as a football member in the conference.”

That might already have happened had retired commissioner John Swofford forced the Irish’s hand in 2020 by exercising the leverage he gained because of the COVID pandemic. Instead, Swofford dropped the ball by allowing them to play a conference schedule, saving their season from cancellation in the process, without any guarantees for the future.

Now it’s up to Swofford’s successor Phillips, a former senior associate athletic director at Notre Dame with 2 children who attend the school, to try to bring the Irish into the fold.

Some of his confidence in the ACC’s future with Notre Dame stems from the grant of media rights the Irish signed when their other athletic programs joined the league in 2013 – the document that requires it pay an exit fee of around $100 million should it decide to leave the ACC for any other conference before 2036.

The rest comes from the fact that the Irish would be crazy to go anyplace else.

Sure, the Big Ten is a better geographic fit. And the SEC offers a much higher profile. There’s no question that the revenue generated by either of those conferences would be greater than anything the ACC could offer.

But does Notre Dame really want to be part of a super conference that would force it to compete with the likes of Ohio State, Michigan, Georgia, Alabama, Texas and Oklahoma, among other brand names, for one of those precious Playoff spots every year?

Or would it be better off taking a much less congested detour on the road to an automatic bid?

Considering the Irish’s competitive history against the ACC, that detour might seem more like an HOV lane all to themselves.

Last week’s 35-14 beatdown of then-No. 4 Clemson was their 27th consecutive regular-season win against an ACC opponent. That number will increase to 28 after next week’s game against Boston College.

They’ve beaten every current ACC member except NC State and Miami during the streak, which dates to 2017 and they’ve won emphatically. This year’s victories against Clemson, North Carolina — the 2 best teams in the ACC — and Syracuse have come by an average of 17 points.

That kind of conference dominance would come in especially handy in a season like this one. They’d have absolutely no shot at an at-large bid as an independent with ugly losses to mid-major Marshall and lowly Stanford on their record.

This should be a no-brainer. It makes sense for both sides.

Though the ACC’s survival no longer depends on the addition of Notre Dame in football thanks to Playoff expansion, it still needs the Irish bad enough to give them whatever concessions they want. Including the ability to negotiate their own TV deal.

Notre Dame, on the other hand, is just as motivated to retain its status as an elite national program by making regular Playoff appearances and being front-and-center in the national championship conversation every year.

Its best opportunity to do that is in the ACC.

Either way, it’s a goal that will eventually force the Irish into making a choice between their tradition of independence and the risk of becoming an antiquated relic with a golden dome and a cool fight song.