You can call it destiny. You can call it luck. Or you can call it fitting for how this college football season has gone for both the Notre Dame Fighting Irish and the Indiana Hoosiers.
The two will face each other for the first time in 33 years in the first round of the College Football Playoff as assigned by the CFP selection committee. Indiana is seeded 10th and Notre Dame is seeded 7th. The winner between them will face Georgia in the quarterfinals.
Indiana, 11-1 in their best season in program history, will square off with Notre Dame, also 11-1, and a program that expects to compete for national championships every year. Both teams are boasted among the top teams in the country when it comes to margin of victory over their opponents, which factored greatly into their selection for the playoff.
The Hoosiers surprised everyone this season. They were picked to finish 17th out of the now 20 teams in the Big Ten. Under new head coach Curt Cignetti, now the Big Ten Coach of the Year, the Hoosiers rattled off 10 straight wins before their eventual loss to Ohio State but bounced back with a 66-0 beat down of Purdue to solidify their spot in the brand new playoff.
Many of Indiana’s key wins that got them to this point included Nebraska, Michigan State, and Michigan. Their only ranked opponent was a 2nd-ranked Ohio State, whom they lost to 38-15. Indiana took some criticism from prognosticators about their ‘strength of schedule.’
“The week prior, we talked about where teams are and who they played, who they beat, how they beat them,” said CFP Selection Committee chairman Warde Manuel. “We’ve been asked as a committee to rank the teams one through 25 and then have been asked to seed the teams.”
This will be the first time Indiana will compete for a national championship in the program’s history. This includes periods dating back to the poll era of national champions when Indiana finished the season ranked #4 after losing to the consensus national champions USC in the Rose Bowl Game.
Notre Dame started off the season much differently having lost to, quite frankly, an inferior Northern Illinois team that ended up finishing seventh in the MAC. The season was uncertain for the Irish as their margin for error was virtually zero throughout the rest of the season.
The Irish rode the razor’s edge the rest of the way beating each of their next 10 opponents, which included ranked opponents in Louisville, Navy, and Army. Head coach Marcus Freeman stressed incessant “preparation” for each and every game since their loss to NIU.
This marks Notre Dame’s third appearance in the College Football Playoff since it was instituted in 2013. The Fighting Irish have not won a national championship in the BCS or CFP eras of college football. Their last championship came back in the poll era in 1988 under then-head coach Lou Holtz.
The meeting on December 20th at Notre Dame Stadium in South Bend will be the first meeting between Indiana and Notre Dame since 1991, which resulted in a 49-27 win for Notre Dame. The Irish lead the all-time series with Indiana 23-5. The Hoosiers have not beaten Notre Dame since October 21, 1950, which was a 20-7 result in Bloomington.
