At the dawn of the 1991 season, NBC introduced college football fans to something different.
The network acquired the rights to exclusively broadcast Notre Dame Fighting Irish home games and put together a flowing opening montage that highlighted the program’s illustrious history interspersed with a cameraman walking down the steps from the locker room to the field. Clips of speeches from legendary coach Knute Rockne were sandwiched around notable highlights and shots of the famous “Play Like a Champion” sign that is forever part of program lore. The fight song played in the background to give it a familiar tune that tied it all together on a telecast that was undoubtedly focused first on the program in South Bend and everybody else a distant second.
At the end, as the cameraman reached field level, broadcaster Dick Enberg began to voice a preview of the Irish that year under Lou Holtz. After covering all the requisite ground for the home side, the visitors from Bloomington, Ind., were eventually brought up with a note that the intrastate rivalry with the Indiana Hoosiers was being renewed for the first time in 33 years.
The thing about a rivalry, though, is that more than geography has to be a factor—the two teams actually have to play to get the juices flowing. The Irish and Hoosiers, separated by 199 miles from stadium gate to stadium gate, have not met since that historic opener.
Until this week that is, when just the 30th meeting between programs will take place amid the fanfare of the College Football Playoff in the very first game played on campus as part of the inaugural 12-team bracket. It will probably get brought up again—coincidentally in the first non-NBC broadcast of a Notre Dame home game since 1990—that there’s been another three-decade gap since the two have squared off.
If you expect tensions to flare Friday night, you probably will be disappointed.
When Indiana coach Curt Cignetti strolled to midcourt at Assembly Hall after first taking the job last year, he specifically called attention to what he thought of the Hoosiers’ primary in-state rival, the Purdue Boilermakers: They sucked. The Big Ten’s two name-brand behemoths in the Michigan Wolverines and Ohio State Buckeyes which had, at the time, won the last seven conference titles in football, were mentioned next in saying he would not take a backseat to anybody.
Left unsaid? A certain national power 3½ hours north that was generally left out of sight and out of mind with the exception of those fans who cross over to root equally for Irish football as much as they do Hoosiers hoops.
Whether Cignetti was informed by school brass about the rivalry dynamics when he got the gig or, well, did his own Googling of the matter is not known. But it adds an element for outsiders to view the CFP matchup through with massive implications on each side well beyond the state’s borders.
“I think to me and our guys, in my mind, it’s just another game. You prepare for this one like you prepare for all of them. I think for our players, they’re going to be excited to play and excited to prove something,” Cignetti said. “At the end of the day, it’s just football. The game is going to be won or lost between the white lines. I want them to go out there, fly around, have a little swag and play the way we can play.”
It may be just football to the 160-odd players on the sidelines in frigid conditions at Notre Dame Stadium, but the historic meeting will not lack intrigue or hype.
Touchdown Jesus will be all lit up. The Leprechaun will be dancing. Green and gold will mix with plenty of red-and-white candy stripes.
It’s Hoosiers vs. Rudy—not in a debate over which sports classic was the better movie, but for the right to ring in the new year at the Sugar Bowl against the Georgia Bulldogs and move a step closer toward winning a national championship.
“They’re motivated by this opportunity more than anything,” Irish coach Marcus Freeman said. “They’re motivated to play in the first-ever playoff game at Notre Dame Stadium versus a dang good football team [from] Bloomington, Ind., and that’s where the motivation lies more than anything.”
The casual viewer will probably not blink at Notre Dame hosting such an occasion given the history around South Bend—11 claimed national titles and seven Heisman Trophy winners. The Irish also have the duality of being one of the country’s most followed teams and can claim to be the most loathed.
Still, it was anything but smooth sailing this season for Notre Dame, which started in prime CFP contention after an eye-opening win over the Texas A&M Aggies before it was stunned in Week 2 by the Northern Illinois Huskies.
In retrospect, that result is the season’s most puzzling as the Huskies lost their next two and never really were in contention for the MAC title.
“I would be lying if I say I don’t think about that [NIU] loss or being upset. Fear is a motivator,” said Freeman, who signed a hefty contract extension this week. “A lot of people are motivated by fear or greed, and there’s times that I have to remind myself that’s the result of not preparing the right way. But sometimes it takes the performance that we had versus NIU to go back and say, ‘Hold on. What lessons do we have to learn?’ ”
Apparently a lot as Notre Dame navigated the knife’s edge of having the worst loss imaginable in the eyes of the selection committee.
The Irish destroyed Purdue, 66–7, to take out some of the frustrations and slowly built up momentum from there. There was a 49–7 blowout of the rival Stanford Cardinal and a 51–14 shellacking of the Navy Midshipmen, who were ranked in the top 25 at the time. That kicked off a five-game stretch to close out the season where Notre Dame scored at least 35 points each game and the defense ascended to third in the country in points per game allowed.
Outside of the Oregon Ducks, perhaps nobody in the College Football Playoff enters the tournament with more momentum than the Irish.
“Our goal every day is to get a little bit better at what we do that day. I think we’ve continued to do that throughout the season,” offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock said. “That trend continues with this group because of the work they put in and because of the attention to the details that they have.”
If that’s allowed Notre Dame to get where it is supposed to be at this point in the season, the same is true for the Hoosiers.
In Cleveland.com’s annual preseason Big Ten football poll, the Hoosiers were picked 17th. If you could even find a sportsbook to offer you national title odds on the team, you were looking in the +100,000 range.
Cignetti is a veteran coach who knows how to build up a program no matter the resource level, though. He was on Nick Saban’s staff in the early days of the Alabama Crimson Tide dynasty. He successfully turned around teams such as the Division II Indiana University (of Pennsylvania) Crimson Hawks and FCS Elon Phoenix, plus transitioned the James Madison Dukes into the FBS ranks as a budding Sun Belt power.
It was even easier to flip the fortunes of the Hoosiers due to the transfer portal and immediate eligibility allowing 13 former Dukes from JMU’s 2023 team that went 11–2 to join the migration to the Midwest.
“I’ve known these guys for a long time. I was thinking about it the other day. I’ve known [defensive lineman] James Carpenter since 2019, and I was thinking, it’s going to be weird being in a defense that doesn’t have James Carpenter in it,” defensive coordinator Bryant Haines said. “They’ve been great. They changed the culture. They’re a huge part of what you’re seeing now in terms of the change in IU football is from those guys we brought from JMU, no question.”
All that’s followed since has been the best season in school history, with records for overall wins and most offensive touchdowns in a single season and the most unexpected of berths in the playoff.
“Obviously, it’s a 11–1 football team. Very talented, but you can tell they’re coached well,” Freeman said. “They play, as I often say, with the clarity that you look for. When you watch film, it’s a team that plays fast. A team that understands what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, how they’re doing it.
“We understand it’ll be a great challenge for us.”
For such an off-the-radar story, it’s fitting the next step will come against a Notre Dame team that has largely not been on Indiana’s radar. The two schools have a home-and-home set for 2030 and ’31, but few expected the pair to renew their in-state rivalry before then—much less with the stakes of the playoff underpinning it all.
There may not be all that much of a rivalry between the two beyond intra-family squabbling at the moment, but things will certainly change after Friday night. Bragging rights are on the line in the state of Indiana, and neither side is backing down from the challenge.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Notre Dame, Indiana Renew In-State ‘Rivalry’ With College Football Playoff at Stake.
