He is the beat writer from the basketball side of things.

He is also a columnist talking sports and a return guest to this program on the Express Pro Tire and Auto Guest Line is where we find Tom Nooy.

Tom, you kind of had a feeling, did you not?

That when I think a lot of people just thought, you know what, this is too spicy to pass that they're going to pit Indiana against Notre Dame and put them up against one another.

But let's begin with the Notre Dame side of things.

When Northern Illinois beat them, we wondered what direction they would then turn.

Obviously, that was the anomaly.

What did Marcus Freeman do over the course of the year that allowed Notre Dame to just kind of get better week by week?

Continued to hammer home what the hell happened against Northern Illinois.

He did it on a weekly basis, whether they were playing Louisville,

whether they were playing Florida State, whether they were playing USC.

When they would gather for team meetings, sometime during the week,

he would say, remember what happened against Northern Illinois, when we had all the answers, when we were flying high after we went to Kyle Field and we beat Texas A&M, and then we just went wax the entire week of practice.

Even both Collins said going into the USC game, he said, yeah, we kind of just screwed around that week of Northern Illinois and look what happened.

So Marcus Freeman was very clear as they moved forward, as it was deeper into the season,

we need two in a row, four in a row, in a row.

If you don't prepare, like your lives depend on this, we're going to have another episode of Northern Illinois happen somewhere along the way.

And they took that to heart and said,

we're going to prepare like we've never prepared before for every single opponent. And what

happening is NIH is never going to happen again. Is it actually, Tom, in hindsight,

strangely enough, maybe the best thing to happen to them because they've kind of gone off

the national radar.

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