Why this Notre Dame football team can win it all

Riley Leonard showed up for his postgame press conference in a Jeremiyah Love t-shirt. He poked fun at Jordan Faison, who was sitting in the room waiting to step onto the dais next, for not scoring a touchdown on their 44-yard fourth-quarter connection.

Faison was stopped at the 1. Leonard scored his 15th rushing touchdown, an all-time Notre Dame single-season record for a quarterback, two plays later. Earlier on, Love scored his 16th on a 98-yard, record-breaking sprint to immortality. He’s scored at least one time in every game this season.

Big things. Little things. Things that illustrate how this Notre Dame football team is different.

The Fighting Irish, into the Sugar Bowl following a 27-17 win over Indiana in the first round of the College Football Playoff, have that feel to them. They can do no wrong. They have each other’s backs.

They can absolutely win the national championship. They have the right mindset, and it’s the right people in the locker room making the right decisions.

Everything about it — everything about them — just feels right.

These guys at the end of the day, these guys are pleasers.

“You ask them to do something, they’re going to give you everything they’ve got to try to please you as a coach and do what you ask,” head coach Marcus Freeman said.

Faison knows exactly what that’s like. The sophomore wide receiver won a national championship with the Notre Dame men’s lacrosse team seven months ago. The parallels between that team and the one he’s on now are uncanny.

The lacrosse team lost to a Georgetown squad it felt strongly it should have beaten. The defeat occurred in the friendly confines of South Bend, Ind., but a gut-wrenchingly narrow margin, too.

Sound familiar? The Fighting Irish football team lost, 16-14, to Northern Illinois this year.

The lacrosse team ended up winning the table, finishing with a record of 16-1, hoisting the national title trophy for the first time in program history. The football team is 12-1. If it wins the program’s first national title since 1988, it will finish with a record of 15-1. Almost identical.

Almost too good to be true. Except it isn’t.

Notre Dame strength and conditioning coach Loren Landow encouraged Faison to express his experience with the lacrosse team to his football teammates after a weight room session sometime in the fall. That was easy. He said he can “100 percent” sympathize with the similarities.

“Kind of that same journey,” he said. “It was like, ‘Yo, this is a real chance, and if you don’t think we have a chance, it’s time to lock in, it’s time to go.’”

So many Notre Dame players and coaches motivated themselves that way, waking up the morning after the shocking loss to NIU with the realization that everything this team sought out to accomplish, short of winning each and every game, was still on the table. Well, maybe it wasn’t the next morning. But it definitely didn’t take more than a week. The next time we saw Notre Dame on the field, the Irish boat-raced Purdue, 66-7. It was 42-0 at halftime.

That’s actually who this Irish team is, just like the real Notre Dame men’s lacrosse team was actually the one that ran the table and won its postseason games by an averaging margin of 6.75 goals, including a 10-goal rout of Maryland in the championship game.

Freeman’s team has won 11 games in a row by an average spread of 28.8 points. Being better than just shy of a dozen opponents by an average of four touchdowns every time you lace ‘em up isn’t so bad.

Still not good enough, though. Not until eternal glory is achieved.

Freeman is the third coach in Notre Dame history to lead the Irish to 12 wins in two seasons. Lou Holtz and Brian Kelly are the others. The former? Forever endeared to all things blue and gold. The latter? He didn’t win it all. He doesn’t have a statue of himself outside Notre Dame Stadium. Freeman would like to be more Holtz and less Kelly.

How can he get there? The same way he’s gotten Notre Dame here. Complacency is the enemy of success. Freeman relished in 12 wins, sure. But pretty quickly, he turned his attention to a baker’s dozen.

“I’m greedy,” he said. “My focus is going to be on find a way to get 13. That’s what matters.”