‘Time to give? Not if you’re Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman.
“You know I’m greedy,” Freeman said following the Fighting Irish’s 27-17 College Football Playoff win over Indiana on Friday. “Even though I don’t want to [the team’s] to focus on, I will focus on finding a way to get 13. “
The 13 in question is Notre Dame’s number of wins this season. And with 2024 marking the 100th anniversary of the program’s first 11 national championships, this year’s team would have reached a milestone the Fighting Irish have never reached by reaching that 13th victory.
In defeating Indiana, the 2024 team did something a Notre Dame team has accomplished by winning a playoff game.
OK, so maybe the importance of that “first” needs an asterisk. Friday’s contest was the first game of the first round of the original 12-team format.
The expansion means that if Notre Dame loses its next game in the Sugar Bowl against No. 2 seed Georgia, the 2024 Fighting Irish will be further away from a No. 12 national championship than any of the program’s previous flirtations during the 21st century. .
Still, there is meaning in Notre Dame finally getting over the playoff hump. In the Irish’s three previous postseason games with national championship stakes—the 2013 BCS Championship game and the semifinals in the 2018 and 2020 seasons—they lost by an average of 24 points per game.
Meanwhile, on Friday, Riley Leonard’s touchdown run late in the fourth quarter pushed Notre Dame’s wire-to-wire lead over Indiana to… 24 points.
A late touchdown by the Hoosiers made the Irish’s win look less than good and negated that impression. However, it didn’t change what was a consistent theme on Notre Dame’s road to 12 wins, the nation’s second-longest win streak, and a quarterfinal appearance.
And in turning the tables on IU to start its first 12-team playoff, Notre Dame looked like a team capable of winning its first national championship since 1988—at times.
For about 58 minutes, the Fighting Irish’s defense that had been dominant throughout the regular season took the intensity to another level. The Notre Dame defense combined for three sacks, but IU quarterback Kurtis Rourke was picked off the pocket by the Golden Domes hot pursuit in the most typical way.
The Hoosiers offense that averaged more than 43 points per game couldn’t sniff the end zone until the final outcome was beyond doubt. The knock on the Notre Dame teams in last season’s final defeat was that they didn’t have the difficulty of competing against tough competition in the South.
While we’ll have a better gauge of whether that’s still the case by New Year’s Day, this Fighting Irish defense certainly looked the part when it came to physicality.
Jeremiah Love’s career was limited, a result of the illness that was evident when he spoke with a stern voice in his post-game press conference. All the running back needs is one 98-yard carry to show he can set the tone for an entire game in an instant.
“I came to this game struggling with a few things,” said Love. “To be able to go into this and do what I can do for this team, it’s special.”
At times, against a Hoosiers team whose playoff berth may have been in doubt, the Fighting Irish suffered fouls that could cost them against strong competition. Love life gets better in the next two weeks before the Sugar Bowl is crucial to a Notre Dame offense that moved the ball into the red zone four times but scored touchdowns on only half of those drives.
Building on the momentum of 11 straight wins, and this 11th in particular, is another important point going into the Sugar Bowl, Freeman said.
“But most importantly, it will go up; to get better,” said Freeman. “It’s not a normal game week. We have to find ways to lift and improve…Every week, how do we do it a little bit better?”
In slowly getting better, maybe Notre Dame has figured out how to get better in its pursuit of the postseason.
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