And so it begins tonight! History is made tonight with the first college football playoff game ever at Notre Dame stadium and the first game in the new expanded 12-team format.
Apparently they cleared the snow already at Notre Dame. Damn I wanted a snow game didn’t you!?
GO IRISH!
I hate the Domers with a passion but the best Indiana can hope for is keeping it close. They had a pretty weak schedule in the Big 10 this year and when they had to go up against a good team ( Ohio State), they got blown out. The Domers, unfortunately, should take this one in a cakewalk…
Nice tipped INT by Indiana in Domer territory!!!
Bad INT deep in Domer territory by Rourke…
And the second feed via YouTube is down tonight, so this one form a kind soul in Toronto will have to do for now with the live call from ESPN radio and tracker via YouTube:
Thank you again, Canada!
ND leads 17-3 at halftime 
The last time Indiana played Notre Dame in football was at Notre Dame Stadium in September 1991 in the first home game of the season.
I was there as a student, sneaking my visiting brother into the student section with the identification and ticket of a foreign exchange student who looked like him.
He was a senior in high school headed to college at …Indiana University…where he later earned some of the credits for his degree.
Go figure I had no idea these two teams, in what is also the Indiana State Championship tonight, had never played again ever since that game in September 1991!
What a way for these teams to meet again.
At the half, it is
Notre Dame 17
Indiana 3
Indiana has no business being on this field tonight. They’re getting whipped everywhere in this mismatch…
Go Georgia to whip the Domers…
BOO YOU TOO!
Wow, here late in the third quarter,
Indiana’s DL James Carpenter commits a dirty,
late hit out of bounds on Notre Dame’s QB Riley Leonard after no gain,
when it would have been 4th and 14,
so as to allow Notre Dame to continue their drive into the red zone!
In the end the Fighting Irish had to settle a field goal anyway, but only after chewing up a whole lot more clock and forcing Indiana to use a timeout early.
Notre Dame 20
Indiana 3
It’s a three-score game now for the difference.
one of the most stupid plays I have seen in mny life!!
I feel bad for Rourke, but now I realize that maybe he is not that good, just they have not faced a serious opponent so far, only Ohio and they did quite badly by the way.
doesnt help that the oline has been pathetically inept tonight
Maybe the Rourkes can only be big fish in little ponds???
really, and also the Defense has been pretty weak, this last drive has been better, but maybe also ND’s D has lowered the intensity a little bit thinking about the next game.
well, at least they got a TD, maybe that will help Kourtis on his way to the NFL.
Is it just me or did Marcus Freeman willfully ignore Cignetti?
Nobody can honestly look in the mirror and say Indiana is better than Miami and Alabama. But it will never be a perfect system.
So I’ll share some local background here from Indiana, where I grew up and then also lived for a year.
Basically this was the Indiana State Championship last night as well.
I grew up in Indianapolis and then also later lived a year there from 2015 to 2016, and the local media are generally homers for Indiana University, which was evident also via that loudmouth Pat McAfee last night as well, for he has his show based in Indianapolis and lives there.
Though Indiana University and Notre Dame hardly ever play each other in football, they do play each other in basketball and in other sports and there is a heated rivalry there though I don’t think the intensity is what it used to be, but the alumni of Indiana are all over it along with some of the current students.
Some of them are quite obnoxious or arrogant, and there is always that strain who hates Notre Dame in many schools.
The common haterade does not go the other way from Notre Dame to Indiana. Those feelings are reserved for a few other schools and some of their alumni.
Personally I’m biased also because I have friends who went to Indiana plus my brother, plus I really like their campus too and visited a number of times when in school, so I don’t feel the same way except when those small few alumni show up, as is the case anywhere.
So in tuning out of the game once Notre Dame secured the second onside kick, I am just learning about this episode now.
Here’s the video in this link. So how did they get here beyond the natural competitiveness?
The handshake was chilly no doubt, but meh, I don’t see icy here sorry and contrary to the claims, Freeman did make a little bit of eye contact. Those were two generals rather worn out from all that effort, so c’mon the armchair critics who think head coaches after a hard game on a chilly night are going to have the energy they have when they go into their next presentation at work or to sell something.
But here’s what Cignetti had said hours before the game though, and the gauntlet was thrown on our turf.
The comments on their own are just competitive fire and normal, but we know it’s WHERE he said this that probably got more attention, plus I think there is more to the story we don’t yet know such that Cignetti stoked some old fire with Coach Marcus Freeman of Notre Dame.
Just hours before his team was set to take the field against the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, Indiana Hoosiers head coach Curt Cignetti offered a bold claim.
During an appearance on ESPN’s “College GameDay” the head coach fired back at critics of the Hoosiers’ schedule. “We don’t just beat Top 25 teams, we beat the [expletive] out of them,” he said on the show.
Put those comments on our turf in the pre-game in with the mix of some obnoxious Indiana fans and the likes of Pat McAfee doing his thing to stir things up for his homer friends and draw more attention to himself, a dirty hit on our quarterback out of bounds, and well, I can see why this went they way it did even though I was not there.
Cignetti looked really sour at the end of that game, and well, I can’t blame him the way Indiana played overall except in the final minutes.
When I could not get the video feed any more, I remember hearing a radio announcer reference how some defensive players on Indiana had already quit on effort in the third quarter as Notre Dame just continued to hammer away running the ball and using the clock.
Also overlooked in this talk about the post-game encounter is that Freeman in an interview after that episode on the field gave deserved high credit to Indiana for playing to the end and putting up points, which should be a lesson for the Irish especially given that Georgia is next.
There’s no room for sloppiness like that going into that next game. There was a time when I’m sure many players felt they had the game in the bag, but then Indiana recovered the onside kick. Uh-oh. You bet the hands team will be practicing defense against the onside kick plus recovery when the kicking team a whole lot in the coming days, for something is seriously wrong.
In my entire life rooting for the Fighting Irish, with Notre Dame my alma mater, Georgia has generally terrorized Notre Dame. There is no margin for crappy play or taking a play off against a solid team like that.
Who knows, I figure it takes a few years, but should the SEC and Big Ten move to a Super League for the post-season, with NIL and compensation flowing all the more now, I think we will have more parity in Pro College Football.
Of course I’ve been covering all this progression since May 2022 and the NCAA Football thread, and there have been some more recent developments taking us down that road whether or not the SEC and Big Ten decide to have their own postseason (aka their own “Super League”) as soon as 2026.
And I didn’t watch very much action on Saturday for the other college football playoff games, but they were generally blowouts with a heavy advantage for the home team.
And there’s been a lot of overreaction on the new format as if we’ve never had College Football Playoff blowouts ever before, as Dennis Dodd writes.
There was a bit of rage from the butt-hurt, generally SEC types,
with ESPN predictably trying to shill for effectively more of a role in picking the matchups than already at hand
(i.e. probably wanting to position itself for the SEC and Big Ten in a Super League anyway),
as after the win by Ohio State, Scott Van Pelt of ESPN was bloviating about all the games not being competitive by the fourth quarter and trying way too hard to be subtle and discreet as he carried ESPN’s water.
And the playoff fun starts again on New Year’s Eve tomorrow night.
Right on here and as Alabama also lost today in its hyped-up bowl game against Michigan, they can continue with their butt-hurt status along with their homers at ESPN plus Nick Saban as usual.
The playoff at least got this much right to keep Alabama and any other whiny SEC teams OUT of the College Football Playoff with three losses, but now with four oh well Alabama can cry a river.