SOUTH BEND, Ind., and COLUMBUS, Ohio — Notre Dame and Ohio State, two iconic football schools located five hours from one another, provided the bookend settings for the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff’s opening weekend. One atmosphere felt festive, after two brief appearances of sunshine did little to thaw the two inches of snow that backdropped Notre Dame’s in-state showdown with Indiana. The other skewed more intense, with the haunting opening salvo of Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” blaring throughout the evening as Ohio State took on Tennessee.
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The joyful mood in South Bend permeated the pregame atmosphere and culminated with the No. 7 seed Fighting Irish’s 27-17 win over the No. 10 Hoosiers. The next night, inside the amped-up Horseshoe, the No. 8 seed Buckeyes relentlessly pounded No. 9 seed Tennessee in a 42-17 victory.
Those moments joined similarly charged scenes in State College, Pa., and Austin, Texas, to usher in a new era of college football’s postseason. Freezing temperatures and swirling winds added new elements to the sport’s national title chase. Perhaps the results failed to match the spectacle — all four first-round games were decided by double digits — but the pageantry on display when fans converged on campuses in mid-December pointed toward a promising future.
“The best thing about college football is the fan bases are so big,” Ohio State defensive end Jack Sawyer said. “Tennessee has got a great fan base. I knew they were going to travel. A lot of them were in our hotel, so we knew there’s gonna be a lot of them there. Our fans, they stepped up in a big way. I loved it.”
A whirlwind 36-hour journey to both opening night games of college football’s new postseason experiment revealed some of the best pomp and circumstance that college football has to offer, alongside some more forgettable moments that may still linger for years to come.
Snow piled on the shoulders of the statues depicting Irish national champion coaches Dan Devine and Knute Rockne hours before kickoff, requiring constant maintenance from Notre Dame campus and local work crews. The weather had no effect on tailgating with parking lots filled to near capacity.
A half-mile south of Notre Dame Stadium, a “Battle of the Hoosier State” banner stretched across the back side of a tent. There is no football rivalry between the Irish and Hoosiers; before Friday, they had played just once in the last 66 years. Notre Dame has impacted college football history more than any other university. No program in Big Ten history has lost more games than Indiana. Yet here they were, sharing a historic perch as the first participants in the Playoff’s new era.
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“Not many times in life you’re the first to do something, and as I told the group in there, we were the first to win and play a playoff game in Notre Dame Stadium,” Fighting Irish coach Marcus Freeman said. “That’s historic, something we’ll cherish for the rest of our lives.”
Indiana had never won 10 games in a season, let alone compete for a national title, but first-year coach Curt Cignetti molded a collection of talented players from the transfer portal to put the Hoosiers in the spotlight. Indiana’s ascension gives hope to all programs that a College Football Playoff berth is not a mirage past Blue Blood Mountain. It’s real.
But just as visible Friday was the talent disparity, no more starkly than when All-America safety Xavier Watts brought down an interception at the 2-yard line and his teammate Jeremiyah Love broke loose for a 98-yard touchdown run on the next play, handing Notre Dame a lead it would not relinquish. The Hoosiers scored two touchdowns in the last 87 seconds to produce a final score that did not reflect the game flow.
Cignetti referenced depth, speed and size as issues in his postgame remarks but pivoted each time to Indiana’s broader accomplishments.
“You are what your record says you are,” Cignetti said. “So, 11-2. Tied for second in the Big Ten. Made the College Football Playoff. And packed the stadium. Made a lot of people proud. And had a historic season. So set the foundation for hopefully what’s to come.”
A ticketing glitch led to Tennessee fans collecting an unprecedented number of seats at the Horseshoe. Neither Michigan nor Penn State nor any fan base had ever filled sections like the Tennessee faithful. The Vols’ version of “Rocky Top” penetrated the mostly soundproof glass inside Ohio Stadium’s press box. And while the swaths of orange in the stands were notable, their dominance of the storyline wasn’t permanent. As the scarlet and gray filled in the rest of Ohio Stadium, their voices drowned out the visitors, and with “Seven Nation Army” blaring at kickoff, the stench of Ohio State’s loss to archrival Michigan three weeks earlier evaporated.
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The Buckeyes attacked Tennessee’s man coverage with their talented group of receivers and built a 21-0 first-quarter lead. It simply was too much power, too much juice.
“I told them in the locker room that in life you’re going to be defined by the way you handle adversity in life,” Ohio State coach Ryan Day said. “So, to see the way that they responded in this game, you can tell from the jump that they had a look in their eye that they were going to go win this game. I thought they played that way.”
Tennessee crawled back into the game in the second quarter and trailed by just 11 at halftime. But Ohio State struck again early in the third quarter with receiver Jeremiah Smith’s second touchdown reception, which ended the game’s competitive phase.
“(We) had a great game plan to come in and fire first, and they hit us in the mouth first,” Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava said. “We were just trying to recover that whole game.”
With two signature programs from the nation’s top two conferences meeting on campus for the first time, the team capable of harnessing the palpable passion in the building had the upper hand.
The Indiana contingent was proud but outnumbered at Notre Dame. (Scott Dochterman for The Athletic)
No one is more reviled in college football than the overachiever. Teams that surpass the expectations of their recruiting rankings to rack up victories against an advantageous schedule and invade the space reserved from the sport’s blue bloods shift quickly from darling to despised. In this way, the 2024 Indiana Hoosiers were a repackaged version of the 2015 Iowa Hawkeyes or the 2010 Boise State Broncos, and their 12-team Playoff debut only amplified the debate they had sparked all season.
The Hoosiers’ schedule included both national championship game participants from January in Michigan and Washington, in addition to a trip to Ohio State. But the Wolverines and Huskies combined for a 13-11 record, which opened Indiana’s 11-1 campaign up to detractors. ESPN’s talking heads, including former Ohio State quarterback Kirk Herbstreit, attacked the Hoosiers without regard for their season-long performance. Play-by-play broadcaster Sean McDonough took up a similar line of discussion while calling the Indiana-Notre Dame game, as the Hoosiers fell behind 27-3: “I don’t understand why there’s this presumption from many that the Big Ten is so much better than the ACC or the Big 12. I’m not sure what that’s based on.”
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Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin, whose three-loss team finished 14th in the CFP rankings and watched the weekend’s action from home, joined the chorus of teardowns on social media.
Ultimately, the 10-point margin between Notre Dame and Indiana was the smallest of the four CFP games over the weekend.
“This team earned it — the right to be here,” Cignetti said. “I’m not sure we proved (that Friday) to a lot of people.”
Nowhere does defeat linger more prominently than in the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry, and no matter how far the Buckeyes take their Playoff run, some fans will certify the season with an asterisk because of that loss. The first-round game in Columbus forced scarlet and gray supporters to compartmentalize quickly.
A man wore a Michigan sweatshirt in the front row along Ohio Stadium’s west side, visible to the Buckeyes during warmups. Meanwhile in the southeast corner, Brandon Milhoan of nearby Grandview held a scarlet flag that read “Ohio Against the World.”
“That was gone before we got here today,” Milhoan said of the Michigan frustration. “We silenced a lot of the doubters.”
In the final seconds of the Buckeyes’ rout, “Rocky Top” blared over the loudspeaker, quickly followed by “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye”. As the Volunteers left the field, Ohio State students chanted mockingly “S-E-C! S-E-C!” The temperature fell from 25 degrees at kickoff into the teens by the end, and the Tennessee players who had emerged shirtless for warmups left themselves exposed to the traditional narratives about teams from the South playing in the cold.
“Tennessee fans were next to us the whole game and they were cold and complaining,” Milhoan said. “They didn’t understand how we could do this. It was a lot of fun.”
Still, the Vols made quite the impression, trekking north en masse to take over roughly 20 percent of one of the sport’s most hostile environments for the chance to see their school get its first Playoff shot.
“It meant a lot for us,” Tennessee defensive lineman Omari Thomas said. “We play for each other. We play for the fans. We play for the culture. Like being a part of Tennessee culture, it just means a lot to us.”
A resounding win over Tennessee allowed some Ohio State fans to put the Michigan loss out of mind. (Scott Dochterman for The Athletic)
Even though Notre Dame had no choice in where its next Playoff game would be held, Sugar Bowl officials formally extended an invitation to Freeman, who happily accepted the Irish’s first trip to New Orleans since the 2006 season.
Hosting a CFP game is the best the independent Irish could do under the current setup. With that mission complete, Freeman embraced the moment.
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“You don’t get enough time in life and enough time in situations like this not to enjoy it,” Freeman said. “I was reminded of that by a couple people I talked to but also just talking to the team. Enjoy this. Enjoy this. Don’t look ahead. Enjoy this, and then we’ll move forward.”
Before conference championship games determined every bowl destination, clinching a Rose Bowl berth inside Ohio Stadium on the final weekend of the regular season was almost a semi-annual rite for the Buckeyes. On Saturday, players again walked on their home turf carrying roses with their teeth. While Pasadena is no longer considered the ultimate destination for Big Ten teams in light of CFP expansion, the Rose Bowl remains a meaningful tie to the conference’s past. That came through as vividly as the relief on Day’s face.
Freeman remarked that “There’s no such thing as cold tough guys” about his Notre Dame receivers warming up without shirts. Ohio State held serve in its own frigid conditions. And both victorious teams will head to more climate-controlled quarterfinals with the additional momentum of one last home victory.
“That’s the great thing about playing in Ohio and playing up north,” Sawyer said.
(Top photo: Jason Mowry / Getty Images)
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