Is it the season of giving? Not if you’re Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman.

“You know I’m greedy,” Freeman said after the Fighting Irish’s 27-17 College Football Playoff win over Indiana on Friday. “Although I don’t want the team to focus on that, I will focus on finding a way to get to 13th place.”

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 of 11 national championships won, this year’s team’s 13th victory would reach territory no Fighting Irish team has ever reached.

With the win against Indiana, the 2024 team accomplished another feat that no Notre Dame team had ever accomplished by winning a playoff game.

OK, maybe the meaning of that particular “first” needs an asterisk. Friday’s contest was the first first-round matchup of the inaugural 12-team format.

The expansion of the tournament means that in 2024, if Notre Dame loses to No. 2 seed Georgia in the Sugar Bowl in their next game, the Fighting Irish will technically be further away from the No. 12 seed for the national championship than in any of the previous flirtations of the program entitled During the 21st Century.

Nonetheless, it is significant that Notre Dame has finally overcome the playoff hurdle. In the Irish’s three previous postseason games with national championship appearances – 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, Riley Leonard’s walk-in touchdown carry late in the fourth quarter on Friday increased Notre Dame’s lead over Indiana to … 24 points.

Two late Hoosiers touchdowns made the Irish victory less cosmetically impressive and negated that part of the symbolism. However, it did not change the guiding principle that accompanied Notre Dame on its way to twelve wins, the second-longest winning streak in the country and a place in the quarterfinals.

And when Notre Dame turned the tables on IU to open the first 12-team playoffs, it at times looked more like a team capable of winning the program’s first national championship since 1988.

For about 58 minutes, the Fighting Irish defense, which has been outstanding throughout the regular season, ramped up the intensity to new levels. Notre Dame’s defenders combined for three sacks, but IU quarterback Kurtis Rourke was far more routinely flushed with gold domes on the chase.

A Hoosiers offense that averaged more than 43 points per game couldn’t sniff the end zone until the final score was no longer in doubt. The downside of Notre Dame teams in recent postseason failures has been that they lacked the punch to compete with tough competition from the South.

While we’ll have a better idea of ​​whether that’s still the case at the end of New Year’s Day, this Fighting Irish defense certainly looked good physical-wise.

Jeremiyah Love’s workload was limited, due to an illness evident in his speaking in a muffled voice at his postgame press conference. However, the running back only needed one 98-yard carry to show that he can set the tone for an entire game with a single snap.

“I was struggling with a few things coming into this game,” Love said. “It’s special to come here and do what I can do for this team.”

At other times, against a Hoosiers team whose inclusion in the playoffs might have been in doubt, the Fighting Irish suffered mistakes that could cost them against tougher competition. Improving Love’s health over the next two weeks leading up to the Sugar Bowl is crucial for a Notre Dame offense that put the ball in the red zone four times but scored touchdowns on just half of those drives.

Building on the momentum of 11 straight wins, and especially this 11th, is another key point before the Sugar Bowl, Freeman said.

“But more importantly, it will rise; it just keeps getting better,” Freeman said. “It’s not a normal game week. We have to find ways to evolve and improve… How do we do it a little better every week?”

Maybe Notre Dame has figured out how to get significantly better in the postseason by getting a little bit better at a time.