BLOOMINGTON – Sept. 7, 1991, was an unseasonably warm day in South Bend.
Indiana was scheduled to play Notre Dame at the latter’s eponymous on-campus stadium, in both teams’ season opener. Bill Mallory, who’d steered IU to four bowls in five years, held high hopes for his Hoosiers. Lou Holtz was riding the wave of three-straight top-10 finishes nationally, including a title in 1988.
The game was the first ever broadcast as part of Notre Dame’s new contract with NBC. No one knew it then, but that would launch its own sort of revolution.
Only seven years earlier, NCAA v. Board of Regents wrested control of television rights from the national association and handed them to the schools. When Notre Dame left the now-defunct College Football Association to sign a five-year, $38 million contract to broadcast its games with NBC, it launched a media rights arms race that still rages today.
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Dick Enberg, an IU alum who anchored the radio broadcast of the first-ever Little 500 decades earlier, called the game alongside three-time Super Bowl-winning coach Bill Walsh.
Temperature at game time was 86 degrees Fahrenheit.
“I just remember it being so hot,” former IU defensive lineman Greg Farrall said.
The game offered a national stage upon which both sides hoped to launch a memorable campaign. And until kickoff Friday night, it will remain, more than 33 years later, the last time Indiana and Notre Dame played in football.
Indiana and Notre Dame first met on Saturday, Nov. 5, 1898, a quarter century before the state’s flagship university would begin naming its athletic teams “Hoosiers.”
IU won 11-5 in South Bend, the Evansville Courier and Press the next day proclaiming Indiana University “maintained her football name” with the victory. Indiana played a game at DePauw two days later, and at Purdue the following Saturday.
It remains to this day IU’s only win over Notre Dame in South Bend.
In total, the two in-state foes have faced each other 29 times. Twenty of those meetings occurred before the United States entered World War II. All but one were played before 1960.
Theories vary as to why the two so rarely meet in college athletics’ most popular sport. Some blame the competitive imbalance historically between the two programs, others Notre Dame’s already established and more geographically natural rivalries with other Big Ten schools (Michigan, Michigan State, Purdue).
There is the undeniable cultural divide between the northern part of the state, which more closely identifies with Chicago and Michigan, and the southern part, which makes Kentucky a more natural rival for Indiana.
Whatever the reasons, history tells a clear story — Friday’s College Football Playoff first-round matchup will be just the second meeting between the programs in 66 years.
“I think it’s wonderful for the state of Indiana that these two teams are playing,” Farrall said.
The last time they faced one another, each arrived with its own expectations.
Indiana spent its offseason preparing for the Irish. The Hoosiers, led by All-American running back and eventual first-round draft pick Vaughn Dunbar, believed they had the personnel and experience to win the Big Ten.
Many of the players recruited to that team bought into Mallory’s belief Indiana could turn itself into a winner. Their freshman year they’d defeated Ohio State by 34 points at home. As seniors, all in on Mallory’s decision to switch from a 5-2 to a 4-3 defense that offseason, they wanted to walk out on top of their league.
“When it was announced we were going to play them in the opener, it kind of really gave us a nice boost through the whole offseason,” then-IU running backs coach Buck Suhr said. “We just really felt like ’91 was a football team we could win the conference with.”
On the opposite sideline, Notre Dame expected excellence. Where Indiana painted the Irish with a bull’s eye, Holtz’s team simply expected to win every time it took the field.
“Everything we did was with in intention, and it spoke to the standard,” former Notre Dame offensive lineman Aaron Taylor said. “The way Lou Holtz presented it was (the Virgin Mary on Notre Dame’s famous golden dome), that was the ultimate standard. But behind that was this championship standard.”
Each saw that warm September Saturday in 1991 as the first step toward something special.
The game itself was competitive early.
Fans wondered whether the arrest on suspicion of underage drinking of quarterback Rick Mirer and linebacker Demetrius DuBose might distract the Irish, but Mirer was intent on ensuring it didn’t.
“All that stuff is behind us,” Mirer told reporters postgame. “We shut the door on that. I just needed to go out and play.”
After taking a 3-0 lead, Indiana handed advantage back when Trent Green threw a pick-six to DuBose. The Hoosiers responded by retaking the lead, 10-7, and then answering another Notre Dame score with one of their own to lead 17-14.
Things turned for good after Mirer kept the ball for a 46-yard touchdown run in the second quarter.
On the ensuing kickoff, Holtz surprised Indiana with an onside kick. Notre Dame linebacker (and future Colt) Brian Ratigan recovered, and the Irish scored again two plays later. In the span of 30 game seconds, a 17-14 lead had become a 28-17 deficit for Mallory’s team.
Scott Bonnell kicked a field goal to cut the lead to eight points just after halftime, before Notre Dame tore off two more touchdown drives and put the game out of reach.
“That really hurt,” Farrall said of the onside kick. “Things got out of hand at the end.”
The moment they got there came late in the third quarter, in one of the more memorable individual plays of Holtz’s Notre Dame tenure.
Working from its own 42, Notre Dame lined up in the I formation with Mirer under center and two receivers split out to his right. To his left, Irv Smith — at that point Notre Dame’s No. 2 behind Derek Brown — put his hand in the ground at tight end.
Mirer dropped back, stepped away from pressure and found Smith running open between two IU defenders. Smith caught the ball just shy of the 20 and, tucking the ball into his stomach, he powered through four tacklers for the last 20 yards between him and the goal line.
“All I remember in my mind was, ‘I’ve got to find a way to get to the goal line.’ I just kept my legs going, and before I know it, I crossed the end zone. I said to myself, ‘Finally,’” Smith said. “It was almost like I just exhaled. It was a huge moment, greatest moment of my career.”
Trailing the play from his line position, Farrall watched with a clear view as Smith bullied his way through the Hoosiers’ defense into the end zone.
“He just,” Farrall said, “kept on plowing people over.”
It was the most physically defining moment of a game that featured a few, including DuBose’s interception return.
“That was a play where the crowd was going crazy,” Smith said. “It set the tone for the rest of the game. The stands exploded, my teammates exploded.”
By game’s end, Notre Dame had overcome a slow start to pile up 578 total yards of offense. Indiana’s 4-3 would eventually come good, but it endured growing pains that day.
IU defenders remember well — or at least vividly — the team-high 111 yards on 11 carries posted by a promising sophomore fullback the Irish leaned on as they salted the result away in the second half.
“We were right there,” Farrall said. “We were up 17-14 at one time, until they threw Jerome Bettis at us, and it was like trying to tackle a redwood tree that was moving at us at 25 miles an hour.”
Final score: No. 7 Notre Dame 49, Indiana 27.
The loss marked the most points IU had ever scored against Notre Dame. It ended in small controversy, after the Irish — apparently angry Indiana had called timeouts inside the final two minutes trying to get the ball back — faked a punt on fourth down during their final drive. When Notre Dame tried to take a knee and run out the clock, IU linebacker and captain Mark Hagen called timeout again.
“That wasn’t smart on my part, to stoop to their level,” Hagen told the Bloomington Herald-Times afterward. “I was pretty ticked off.”
The two teams haven’t played since. The timeout-fake punt controversy probably isn’t the reason why.
“I think they had that Purdue series, all those years, and it just didn’t make sense to Notre Dame to play two rivals from the state of Indiana,” Suhr said. “We just didn’t fit into that philosophy.”
The game kickstarted seasons of mixed legacy for both sides.
The Hoosiers finished 7-4-1, fourth in the Big Ten at 5-3. They lost at eventual undefeated Big Ten champion Michigan by eight, and at Ohio State by four. But they beat Purdue 24-22 in the Old Oaken Bucket game in November, sealing a date with Baylor in the Copper Bowl. Underdogs pregame, IU dominated the Santana Dotson-led Bears 24-0 in their most recent bowl win to date.
“It gave us confidence, because we felt like we were just as good as Notre Dame,” Suhr said. “It gave us the confirmation that we were as good as we thought we were.”
Notre Dame didn’t realize its championship expectations that season. In some ways, it was a disappointing one for the Irish, who lost the next week at Michigan and then late in the season to Tennessee and at Penn State.
But, after finishing 9-3, Holtz took his team to the Sugar Bowl, where it scored 32 second-half points in a 39-28 win over Steve Spurrier’s Florida.
Smith caught a touchdown pass in that Sugar Bowl. A two-sport athlete who played baseball at Notre Dame for current Brewers manager Pat Murphy, Smith had an epiphany on his flight home to visit his family in New Jersey after the bowl game.
“Something said to me, ‘Irv, it’s time to let it go,’” he said. “I said, ‘It’s time for me to focus on just football.’ I gave baseball up and never turned back.”
He would go on to be drafted in the first round in 1993 by New Orleans, and play seven years in the NFL. His son, Irving Smith Jr., is now with the Texans.
That season saw Taylor break through as well. A sophomore in 1991, the Indiana win was his first career start in college.
Growing up in California, Taylor revered Walsh’s 49ers. His mother taped the game. When she called him afterward, she told her son Walsh had reserved particular praise for the sophomore guard in blue and gold. 
“To have him in the booth saying, ‘Man, this Aaron Taylor kid, he’s going to be special,’” Taylor said, “that was the first time I remember thinking, ‘Man, I could be good at this someday.’”
Walsh’s football instincts weren’t misplaced.
Taylor was twice named an All-American in college. In 1993, he won the Lombardi Award, given annually to the best lineman in college football. A first-round pick himself, Taylor was part of the Green Bay Packers team that won the 1997 Super Bowl. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2021.
Now, Taylor serves a national analyst for CBS Sports. He’ll be among the millions watching Friday night, when Notre Dame and Indiana renew an intrastate series dormant for more than three decades.
Like the rest of college football, Taylor spent this fall marveling at the turnaround Curt Cignetti authored in his first season in Bloomington. A proud Notre Dame alum, he’s also closely followed Marcus Freeman’s patient build in South Bend, where Taylor knows year three has been good to Irish coaches in the past — Holtz, Frank Leahy, Ara Parseghian and Dan Devine all won national titles in their respective third seasons in South Bend.
The two programs approached their last meeting, in 1991, from different directions. One trying to win a national championship, the other trying to measure itself against a title contender.
This time around, Taylor sees a level playing field, and a fascinatingly even matchup, one he said could prove as compelling as any game in the first round of the Playoff.
“There’s a nominal difference with coaching and strategy, but when it all comes down to it, who’s got the better players in key positions. At some point, talent can take over as long as it’s executing,” Taylor said. “That’s what’s intriguing about this upcoming matchup. It’s much more of a fair fight now than it was then.”
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