Is it possible to be an 11-1 football team, have one of the most recognizable brands in college football and still be flying under the radar?

Notre Dame will answer that question when the College Football Playoff begins at Notre Dame Stadium on Friday night vs. No. 10 Indiana (8 pm ET, ABC). The Irish are favored by 7 points, via DraftKings Sportsbook.

If the Fighting Irish are flying under the radar, they don’t mind. And they know they have no one to blame but themselves.

Notre Dame’s lone sin in 2024 came all the way back on Sept. 7. But in the minds of much of the college football universe, it’s a sin for which the Fighting Irish have not been absolved.

A week after clearing a huge path on its road to the College Football Playoff in a dominant win over Texas A&M at Kyle Field, Notre Dame fell violently back to earth in a 16-14 home opener loss to Northern Illinois. The Huskies slowed Notre Dame’s offense all afternoon, intercepting Riley Leonard twice and limiting Notre Dame’s powerful run game to just 128 yards at 4.2 yards per carry. That defense gave Northern Illinois a chance, and the Huskies cashed in on their final possession, driving 31 yards on a tedious 11 plays to set up a 35-yard game-winning field goal by Kanon Woodill.

Notre Dame fans were stunned. The public was left thinking, “Same old Notre Dame.”

Who could blame them?

After all, Notre Dame has made theater of making appearances on college football’s grandest stages only to flop again and again.

A 42-14 loss to Alabama in the 2013 BCS National Championship Game is still a core memory for many in SEC country. But it isn’t just the legion of SEC evangelists who doubt the Irish in big games.

Clemson crushed the Fighting Irish 30-3 in a Cotton Bowl Playoff semifinal in 2018, with Notre Dame once again looking slow and small when lined up with a warm weather juggernaut. You could argue Notre Dame’s 2020 Playoff Semifinal at the Rose Bowl went slightly better, but only if you consider a 31-14 loss to Alabama a moral victory.

Those losses linger, and that’s part of why the Fighting Irish’s September flop against NIU does, too.

Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman understands that. He saw the loss coming, lamenting what he called the worst week of practice he’d seen in his tenure at Notre Dame after the A&M win.

“We were so bad,” Freeman recalled on the docuseries “Here Comes the Irish,” which airs on Peacock. “We had no urgency. We had so many issues and no resolve to fix any of them.”

When results tracked practice, Freeman used the defeat as a chance to look hard at himself.

“I was miserable. We were so miserable as a coaching staff,” Freeman recalled this week. “It was about taking a hard look at ourselves and figuring out what do you have to do to get your program where it needs to be. That’s what I was able to do as an individual, and the program itself did that, too.”

Notre Dame rattled off 10 consecutive wins after the loss to the Huskies, winning 9 of those contests by at least 14 points. The streak included 3 wins over ranked opposition, and 5 games in which the Notre Dame offense scored at least 49 points. It was the type of dominance typically seen from teams that raise trophies at the end of the season, certainly worthy of national respect.

Freeman never asked for it. Instead, Northern Illinois became the rallying cry. At team meetings, postgame chats, in pregame speeches — Freeman kept bringing the Northern Illinois loss to the forefront. It would have been easy to use social media or television to complain about rankings, Playoff seeding or a lack of respect. There has been too much of that from coaches and athletic directors whose teams lost multiple games this season. Freeman chose a different tack.

“Fear is a motivator. It is what it is. A lot of people are motivated by fear or greed, and there’s times I had to remind myself — hey, what’s the result of not preparing the right way,” Freeman said this week. “We reminded the players of it, too. We said, ‘Remember that game against NIU? Hold on to it. What lessons do we have to learn?’ And I’ve been preaching that to the guys and relayed it again this week. We have also been in fight mode, in a Playoff situation, really since Week 3. So our guys understand that, and it’s helped us.”

It’s too simplistic, though, to suggest Freeman is just riding the wave of a motivated team that learned from a loss.

Notre Dame is a better football program today than it was the day Brian Kelly abruptly resigned and left for LSU in November 2021.

That’s a testament to Freeman, who has upgraded the talent level and coaching staff from the Kelly era.

The Fighting Irish long had a talent deficit to the national elite. Now, in 2024, Freeman’s 3rd season as Notre Dame’s head coach, the program has the most 4-star blue chips in the College Football Playoff (57) and ranks 9th overall (6th among Playoff teams) in the 247 Talent Composite, the highest ranking for the Irish since the 2020 Playoff group.

Freeman’s electric recruiting has inked 2 top-10 classes (and another that ranked 12th) since his arrival in South Bend. The benefits of that uptick in recruiting from the Kelly era started to show this season, as a deeper, more talented Notre Dame roster was able to withstand a slew of injuries, including multiple starters on the defensive line and a devastating season-ending injury to Benjamin Morrison, an All-American cornerback and likely 1st-round NFL Draft pick. In prior years, losing key starters might have crippled Notre Dame. This season, the Fighting Irish have hardly lost a step. Notre Dame is getting healthier as the Playoff beckons, buoyed by the news that All-American nose guard Howard Cross III should play Friday against Indiana after missing a month of action.

Cross being available gives the Irish the anchor for their defensive line in time for a test against one of the nation’s most efficient offenses. Led by outstanding quarterback Kurtis Rourke, Indiana enters the Playoff ranked 1st nationally in passing efficiency and 13th in SP+ offensive efficiency, which calibrates how successful an offense is adjusted for tempo and strength of schedule.

It will be a stern test. Rourke has been stellar all year, throwing for 2,827 yards and 27 touchdowns for the Hoosiers. But Notre Dame will field the best secondary Rourke and Indiana have faced all year. Notre Dame ranks 1st nationally in pass efficiency and success rate pass defense, anchored by consensus All-American Xavier Watts at safety. In Rourke’s lone test against a top-10 pass defense this season, he flopped, throwing for just 68 yards (3.3 per attempt) and getting sacked 5 times in Indiana’s lopsided loss at Ohio State. With Cross back in the fold to help the Fighting Irish generate pressure, Notre Dame should be able to keep Indiana at bay.

Notre Dame’s consistency on defense, a staple of the Kelly era that continued when Freeman took over as Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator in 2021, is not surprising.

What has surprised many — and what makes Notre Dame a bona fide national title contender — is the way the offense has come together this season.

Freeman and offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock landed the player they most wanted in the transfer portal in Leonard, who has picked up where Sam Hartman left off a season ago, generating more than 2,750 total yards (2,092 passing, 721 rushing) and completing a career-high 66.2% of his passes.

Most importantly, Leonard is playing the best football of his life as the Playoff beckons. He completed 17 of 22 passes for 2 touchdowns and rushed for 50 yards and another score in Notre Dame’s 49-35 rivalry win at Southern Cal last month, capping a November when he threw 8 of his 16 touchdown passes this season. Notre Dame’s late-season offensive explosion is a huge reason this is the most accomplished scoring offense in school history, averaging 39.8 points per game.

It’s Leonard’s development into a complete quarterback that Freeman and Denbrock believed was possible. Once again, Freeman looks back at the NIU game as a turning point.

“It’s confidence for Riley,” Freeman said this week. “After the Texas A&M win and the NIU loss, he saw the best and the worst it could be, right? And I think that helped himn understand if he could put that stuff behind him and just focus on maximizing the opportunity to be quarterback at Notre Dame, he would grow and get better. And that’s what he’s done. He has more understanding and knowledge of the offense. He has understanding and confidence in Coach Denbrock. His confidence has grown.”

Denbrock, whom Freeman hired away from Kelly at LSU, coached Jayden Daniels to the Heisman Trophy in 2023. Denbrock is masterful at creating offenses that complement what a quarterback does best, and that has played into the hands of Leonard, who is a move-the-sticks player now guiding an offense that ranks 5th nationally in SP+ offensive efficiency and 6th in success rate offense. There was also the comfort of familiarity with Denbrock, who had worked with Freeman already and was acquainted with Notre Dame receivers coach Mike Brown before he took the job. In other words, like everything else Freeman does, there was a method and purpose to the hire that fit with the program’s long-term vision.

That vision has led the Fighting Irish to this moment, a home game for a spot in the College Football Playoff quarterfinals. Yes, the winner plays SEC Champion Georgia, but the Fighting Irish have a better roster this time around, and they have been building for this moment — the chance to finally prove they belong in these types of high-profile, brand program games.

Rarely does a shocking loss become a positive. But at Notre Dame, the Northern Illinois loss has become more than an inflection point.

It has become a rallying cry, one that has helped launch an 11-win season that has earned Notre Dame the opportunity in front of it on Friday night against Indiana.

Lose, and “same old Notre Dame” will be the national narrative yet again.

Win?

Well, that’s all Notre Dame has done since Sept. 7. Keep doing that, and it doesn’t much matter what anyone has to say.