Notre Dame wins a classic against Penn State to earn a chance at college football’s national championship

Wake up the echoes, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish are once again going to play on college football’s biggest stage.

Notre Dame beat Penn State 27-24 in a classic College Football Playoff semifinal, a heavyweight slugfest that saw two teams match each other blow for punishing blow throughout four quarters of tough, Midwestern football.

It will be Mitch Jeter’s name that will go down in the history books, after the kicker belted a 41-yard field goal through the uprights with seven seconds remaining to give the Irish the win. But it took the heroics of Christian Gray and the rest of the Notre Dame defense, along with quarterback Riley Leonard overcoming a slow start to the game to spark the Irish offense in the second half, to put the senior kicker in position to win the game.

It was Gray who picked off Penn State’s star quarterback, Drew Allar, with 33 seconds to play – the first big mistake Allar had made all night – and it was Leonard who converted the tough third downs in the final stretch of the game that ensured the Irish kept the ball moving against Penn State’s nasty defense.

The senior quarterback, who transferred from Duke so he could live his childhood dream of playing at Notre Dame, put Jeter in position. He still had to make the fourth quarter go-ahead kick, something that had not been done in College Football Playoff history up to that point.

The ball wobbled dangerously close to the goal post as it soared through the air but it knuckled and spun true down the middle, sending the Irish to the national championship game on January 20 where they’ll play the winner of Texas-Ohio State, who play in the Cotton Bowl on Friday night.

“He’s been clutch all year,” said Marcus Freeman, the Notre Dame head coach who makes history as the first Black head coach to lead a team to the College Football Playoff national championship game.

When asked about that historic achievement, Freeman said, “I’ve said it before – I don’t ever want to take attention away from the team. It is an honor and I hope all coaches – minorities, Black, Asian, White, it don’t matter. Great people continue to get opportunities to lead young men like this. But this ain’t about me, this is about us. We’re going to celebrate what we’ve done because it’s something special.”

A heavyweight fight

The first half of the game was much of what was expected: Two tough, hard-nosed football teams fighting out the game in the trenches of the offensive and defensive lines.

Both teams found it hard to move the ball in the first quarter as the stout Nittany Lion and Irish defenses lived up to their billing. The first big play game with 4:43 remaining in the first quarter when Penn State’s Zakee Wheately soared through the air to intercept an errant pass from Leonard, who had missed his receiver badly. Still, it took an athletic play from Wheately to come down with the ball and gave his team good field position near midfield.

Allar moved his team down the field, but the drive eventually stalled at the three-yard line after the junior quarterback missed running back Nicholas Singleton, who was wide open in the right flat and would have had an easy touchdown with a better thrown ball. Instead, it was a field goal that opened the scoring to make it 3-0 early in the second quarter.

After another dominant sequence from their defense, Penn State got the ball back deep in their own territory. But that was no matter for the Nittany Lions, wearing their traditional blue and white as they imposed their will during a long drive that finished in the end zone.

The key play of the drive was a fourth-and-2 play from the Notre Dame 16-yard line with four minutes to go in the second quarter. Allar found his star tight end, Tyler Warren, for a short pass that picked up the first down. A few plays later, Singleton plowed through four Irish defenders to get the ball over the goal line and putting Penn State up 10-0 and looking like they were about to physically crush the Fighting Irish.

When Leonard took a big shot from Dvon J-Thomas in the final two minutes of the first half and had to leave the game in order to be assessed for a concussion, it seemed like the Irish were headed into the danger zone. Instead, backup Steve Angeli entered the game and finally got the Irish moving downfield, throwing for first downs and avoiding a catastrophic turnover when Notre Dame jumped on a loose ball caused by a Penn State pass rush. The drive ended in the Irish’s first points, a field goal as time expired in the first half to make the score 10-3.

“We knew this was going to be a heavyweight fight. That’s a really good team we just faced that wasn’t going to quit,” Freeman said to ESPN after the game. “But I told our guys, ‘We’ve been here. We’ve been here in this very position before.’ And they believed and they got the job done. I’m really proud of them.”

The offenses explode into life

Leonard reentered the game after the intermission and the Irish offense suddenly looked totally different. After failing to establish themselves on the ground against Penn State’s tough front seven, the Irish were now running the ball at will and moving their offense down the field like they had ever since a shocking loss to Northern Illinois in September. Leonard took a quarterback keeper up the middle for a touchdown to tie the game 10-10 on the first drive of the third quarter.

The rest of the quarter was the kind of tough football both teams have played all year. The teams traded punts as the defenses asserted themselves again, but the Irish were no longer getting pushed around like they were in the first half.

The touchdown run from Jeremiyah Love to put the Irish up 17-10 epitomized that shift in momentum. Love took the ball and rushed to his left, and was immediately met by a Penn State defender. Love shook off that first tackle and got back to the line of scrimmage, only to meet another Nittany Lion waiting for him. He carried that defender with him as he endured two more hits from would-be tacklers, eventually churning his legs forward and stretching the ball over the goal line in a run that would make the ghosts of Notre Dame proud.

Penn State fired right back with a long drive of their own, this time through the air as Allar started to hit receivers for big chunks of yardage. Singleton eventually made another tough run, lowering his shoulders and blowing through Notre Dame’s Xavier Watts to tie the game at 17-17.

The twin touchdown drives seemed like the turning points in the game, with the offenses starting to finally overpower two dominant defenses. But Dani Dennis-Sutton of Penn State quickly put an end to that with a massive interception of Leonard. The defensive end had dropped into coverage and Leonard tried to sneak a ball past him on the opening play of the drive. No such luck for the veteran quarterback – the pick gave Penn State the ball inside the Fighting Irish 40-yard line.

The Nittany Lions received a big break when an apparent interception on a deep Allar pass was waved off for a pass interference penalty on the Fighting Irish, a call that so upset the Notre Dame fans that some threw trash onto the field in protest. Two plays later, it was Singleton again, rushing to his left and burrowing through his blockers to reach the end zone and put Penn State on top again, 24-17.

Notre Dame throws the final knockout punch

But the Fighting Irish were not done. After methodically moving the ball toward midfield, Leonard found Jaden Greathouse wide open on the right sideline after the Nittany Lions defender covering him fell when the wide receiver made his move to release from coverage. Greathouse had one man to beat after he caught the ball, cutting back and leaving safety Jaylen Reed sprawled out on the turf as he sprinted toward the end zone.

“History is written by conquerors and we’re holding the pen,” Leonard told ESPN after the game. “We decide how we want to write our history. I’m a firm believer in whether you think you can or you can’t do something you’re right. We believed that we can do it and we went out there and did it.”

As the game got into crunch time, the defenses once again stiffened and snuffed out drives in the final two minutes. Pressure on Allar and Leonard meant the star quarterbacks could not make the kind of plays they had made earlier in the quarter, with Leonard in particular taking a killer sack near midfield on a third-down play that meant the Irish would have to punt with less than a minute to play.

When Penn State got the ball, Allar eventually would make the critical mistake that these kinds of games so often hinge on. Throwing across his body as he moved to his left, Allar threw into tight coverage and Notre Dame cornerback Christian Gray made a diving interception at the Penn State 42 with just 33 seconds to play.

Leonard took the ball up the middle on the first play of the drive, getting five yards. On the next play, he took the ball again, getting another two yards as he worked to set up the opportunity for Jeter. On third down, Leonard went back to Greathouse for a 10-yard gain that moved the Irish to the 25 yard line. Leonard took the ball and brought it to the center of the field, setting Jeter up for the 41-yard field goal attempt that would put him into the storied history of the Irish.

It sailed through the uprights and now the Irish are 60 minutes from their first national championship since 1988.

“We’re a special group. You find out a lot about your team at its lowest moments. And this is a group that continued to stay together,” Freeman said. “They trust each other. They leaned on each other, and they got better. … I’m proud of this group. I’m proud of this place. Proud of this university.”

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