Indiana at Notre Dame in CFP will be teams' 1st meeting since '91, winner gets Georgia in Sugar Bowl

Updated Dec. 8, 2024 5:17 p.m. ET

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Indiana will turn in its calling card as the nation's biggest basketball state and become a college football hot spot the week before Christmas.

The College Football Playoff bracket released Sunday sends No. 10 seed Indiana to No. 7 Notre Dame for a first-round game on Dec. 20 with the winner facing No. 2 Georgia in the Sugar Bowl in a quarterfinal game on Jan. 1.

The Indiana and Notre Dame campuses are separated by 200 miles in the Hoosier State, but their football teams haven't met since 1991 and before that 1958. Notre Dame leads the series 22-3.

“Regardless of who we play, this is the playoffs and you win or go home, and we're in it to win it,” Indiana coach Curt Cignetti said. “Our odds of making the College Football Playoff at the beginning of the season, I don't know what they were but they were pretty darn low, I'm sure. We were picked 17th out of 18 teams in the Big Ten. Our odds of winning the next four games are probably significantly higher than they were of making the playoffs in the first place. We've climbed that mountain."

The last time Notre Dame (11-1) and Indiana (11-1) played, Rick Mirer and Jerome Bettis led the Irish to a 49-27 win in South Bend on an 86-degree September afternoon 33 years ago. The temperature will be quite a bit cooler when the teams meet at Notre Dame Stadium in less than two weeks.

Georgia (11-2) earned the Southeastern Conference’s automatic bid and first-round bye by beating Texas in overtime on Saturday with quarterback Carson Beck missing the second half with an injury to his right (throwing) arm. The Bulldogs have won all three meetings with Notre Dame, all of them high-stakes games, and have never faced Indiana.

Though in the same state, Notre Dame and Indiana have been on opposite ends of the college football world. Notre Dame is among five schools with more than 900 all-time wins. The Hoosiers' 691 all-time losses are second-most to Northwestern's 703. Notre Dame claims 13 national championships; Indiana has played in 13 bowls.

Cignetti, hired just over a year ago after a successful run at James Madison, has led the Hoosiers to their most wins in a season and eight more wins than they had a year ago.

“This team has accomplished a lot,” he said. “Saying that, no one is satisfied. The players are hungry for more. The coaches are hungry for more.”

Notre Dame has won 10 straight games since getting upset by Northern Illinois. Irish coach Marcus Freeman said the only downside to playing the Hoosiers is that the Irish didn't draw an opponent from a warm-weather climate.

“The weather obviously isn't going to give us a huge advantage with them not being too far south from here,” he said. "But what a great storyline, what a great opportunity it’s going to be to have two in-state teams playing each other in the first playoff game on a campus.”

Georgia coach Kirby Smart worked with Cignetti when both were on Nick Saban's staff at Alabama from 2007-10, and he said it's been “really neat, really cool” to see the Hoosiers' transformation.

The Bulldogs' first meeting with Notre Dame came in the 1981 Sugar Bowl. Vince Dooley's 1980 Bulldogs finished a 12-0, national championship season with a 17-10 win. A freshman and future Heisman Trophy winner, Herschel Walker, rushed for 150 yards and two touchdowns with a dislocated shoulder to lead the Bulldogs.

Their other two games were early season contests in 2017 and 2019, both Georgia wins.

The Bulldogs will make their 11th appearance in the Sugar Bowl and first since the 2019 season.

“One of the first games I remember actually seeing and watching back in the early '80s as a 5- or 6-year-old kid, Herschel Walker and the moments that happened in the Sugar Bowl all the way through games I've been a part of,” Smart said.

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