The air may have been cold, but the atmosphere was red-hot, as No. 7 seed Notre Dame hosted No. 10 seed Indiana in the first game of the first-ever 12-team college football national championship tournament at Notre Dame Stadium in South Bend, Indiana, on Friday night.

The Fighting Irish prevailed by a score of 27-17 in front of a sell-out crowd of 77,000-plus, but believe me when I tell you that the game wasn’t nearly as close as the final score indicated.

The Irish answered an early Indiana interception with one of their own when Xavier Watts picked off Kurtis Rourke at the Notre Dame two-yard line.

The night’s first touchdown came one play later when running back Jeremiyah Love raced 98 yards down the left sideline to give the Irish a 7-0 lead with 10:57 left in the first quarter.

Notre Dame dominated from that point on, mostly stifling the Hoosiers’ high-powered offense while slowly and methodically building a 27-3 advantage early in the final period.

Indiana added two touchdowns over the final two minutes and even had a chance to make it a one-score game with 25 seconds left, but a second two-point try was unsuccessful, officially ending arguably the greatest season in that program’s history (certainly since the 1960s).

Indiana, which had never finished with double-digit wins in a season in school history, was considered a questionable entrant into the first 12-team playoff. However, the Hoosiers finished the regular season with an 11-1 record–including 8-1 in the Big Ten Conference. It was only a matter of time before we had the NCAA basketball tournament “snubbed” argument about the programs that didn’t make it into the playoff, and it only took one game for that to happen with college football’s expanded postseason. Maybe teams like Alabama and Miami were more deserving, but how can you measure that?

The problem with college team sports is there isn’t a true path to the postseason. There will always be at least a certain level of controversy when a committee made up of humans decides who deserves to be in the playoff field and who doesn’t. They could expand the football postseason field to 24 teams, and teams 25 and 26 would complain.

At any rate, the Fighting Irish will now face No. 2 Georgia in the Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Night. What if the Bulldogs win convincingly? Will folks complain that Notre Dame didn’t belong as one of the eight remaining teams in the tournament?

It was awesome to see the seventh and 10th-best teams in the nation battle it out on Friday night for the right to remain alive for a championship. Just remember how Notre Dame’s season started, with a home loss to Northern Illinois in Week 2. In a previous era when we had a four-team playoff or a two-team playoff, the Fighting Irish would have seen their national title hopes dashed before the first frost.

Now, their fans get to spend the next 10 days dreaming of a trip to the football Final Four if their team can upset the mighty Bulldogs on the first day of the new year.

As for the Hoosiers? They have nothing to be ashamed of. They got a chance to play for the national title of big-time college football. Yes, they came up short in Round 1, but that didn’t mean they didn’t deserve to be there.

This is the reason they should have expanded the college football playoff field a long time ago.

It’s much better when a team gets to prove its worthiness on a playing field and not in the court of public opinion.