Fortuna Files: Penn State and Notre Dame have a lot more similarities than you'd think
From their coaches to their recent close calls, the Nittany Lions and Fighting Irish have a unique recent history relative to other college football bluebloods.
Twenty-four thoughts 24-plus hours ahead of game day:
1. Funny thing about perception: It’s not always rooted in fact. The knock on James Franklin is that he can’t win the big one. The knock on Marcus Freeman has been too many inexcusable losses. Yet guess which teams have the two-best records against the spread since the start of the 2022 season, Freeman’s first year?
2. That’s right: Notre Dame is No. 1 at 27-11-2 (71.1 percent), and Penn State is No. 2 at 26-14-1 (65 percent). It’s almost as if the house always wins, and wins by playing us all for fools.
3. One of these teams will play in the Jan. 20 national title game. For Notre Dame, that could mean the opportunity to play for its first national title since 1988. Penn State, meanwhile, hasn’t won it all since 1986. But let’s be real here: Notre Dame was robbed in 1993 and Penn State was robbed in 1994.
4. There are a lot of imperfections with the current state of college football, but we can at least just be grateful that championships are won on the field.
5. One more similarity between the two programs: Both have coaches who are sons of fathers who served in the Air Force. James Franklin opened up to me about his family’s military background for a 2018 profile in The Athletic.
6. I’ve long thought of Franklin at Penn State similar to how I think of Brian Kelly at Notre Dame. Both worked miracles at their previous jobs (Vanderbilt for Franklin, GVSU, CMU and Cincinnati for Kelly), and both had to dig their respective schools out of deep holes — PSU because of scholarship sanctions, ND because of the Charlie Weis era (and all that preceded it).