Notre Dame beats Indiana in first game of expanded CFP - ESPN

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Notre Dame players and coaches linked arms in the northeast corner of the field late Friday, waiting to sing the alma mater for the final time at home in 2024.

After a slight delay, coach Marcus Freeman bounded into the group, pumping his first toward the student section before the band began to play. No. 7 Notre Dame had beaten No. 10 Indiana 27-17, using a familiar formula of stifling defense, big-play runs and relentless physicality to overwhelm a lesser opponent, just like the Fighting Irish had done for most of the season.

But Friday's win and setting was different. A Notre Dame program steeped in history became the first to win a campus College Football Playoff game. The Irish, who had not won a CFP contest before, played their first Friday home game since 1900, before a full-throated crowd, many of whom came to campus on a snowy morning and celebrated throughout the day and night.

Freeman, fresh off a new contract in his third season as Notre Dame's coach, took a moment to enjoy the scene.

«I've never been part of an environment like that,» Freeman said. «Not many times in life you're the first to do something, and as I told the [team] in there, we were the first to win and play a playoff game in Notre Dame Stadium. That's historic. Something we'll cherish for the rest of our lives.»

Defensive coordinator Al Golden, whose group drove Notre Dame into the CFP and overwhelmed Indiana for much of Friday's game, doesn't walk around campus or the team's facility with blinders on. He absorbs the national championship banners and other symbols of the program's distinct path.

«The lineage is so strong and so storied that it's hard to come about something that's the first,» Golden said. «So everybody in