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.

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.