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Adam Rittenberg, ESPN Senior Writer
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — When Notre Dame running back Jeremiyah Love stepped to the podium late Friday night, he could barely speak.
“I probably sound pretty terrible,” Love said.
After weeks of working his way back from a knee injury sustained in the Fighting Irish’s regular-season finale at USC, Love was hit with flu-like symptoms before a College Football Playoff first-round matchup against visiting Indiana. He spent the days before kickoff working with the athletic training staff and staying as hydrated as possible, even on a frigid game night. Notre Dame running backs coach Deland McCullough didn’t know if Love could impact the game the longer it went on.
Turns out, he needed just one touch.
Despite a voice reduced to a whisper, Love delivered the first earsplitting play of the 12-team College Football Playoff era, a 98-yard touchdown run barely four minutes in that propelled No. 7 seed Notre Dame to its first-ever CFP win. He recorded the longest play in CFP history — by 13 yards — as well as the longest by an FBS player this season, registered the longest play Indiana had ever allowed and tied Fighting Irish running back Josh Adams (2015) for the longest rush in team history.
The run also added to a growing library of highlights for Love, whose hurdles, jukes and blistering speed have made him the main attraction on a Notre Dame team that will face No. 2 seed Georgia in the Allstate Sugar Bowl on Jan. 1 (8:45 p.m. ET, ESPN) for the CFP quarterfinals.
Notre Dame offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock called Love the “engine that kind of sparks this thing.” When quarterback Riley Leonard took the podium Friday, he wore a Jeremiyah Love T-shirt.
“I’ve always been a playmaker,” Love told ESPN on Monday. “My first-ever touch in football, when I was like 6 or 5, I scored a touchdown. My team has always relied on me to make big plays and make spectacular plays.
“I’ve always been the one.”
His combustible skill has been there from the start, but at Notre Dame, a quiet kid has found his voice — even speaking to “College GameDay” from the field before Friday’s game. The 6-foot, 210-pound Love also has built up his body and mind to become a more complete running back.
Can the speedy sophomore from St. Louis carry Notre Dame to its first national title since 1988?
From their seats in the parents’ section at Notre Dame Stadium on Friday, L’Tyona and Jason Love sensed their son was about to do something special.
“I’m usually able to call it,” L’Tyona said. “I’m like, ‘What if he went all the way?'”
“We’re used to seeing him do magnificent and crazy stuff,” Jason added. “We just hold our breath.”
Notre Dame had taken over at its own 2-yard line following a chaotic start to the game that included interceptions by each team. Love took the ball and raced through a hole cleared by linemen Billy Schrauth and Anthonie Knapp and tight end Cooper Flanagan.
In an instant, he zoomed past Indiana’s All-Big Ten cornerback D’Angelo Ponds. The Hoosiers’ other cornerback, Jamari Sharpe, took a poor angle toward Love, crossing in front of Ponds. But it didn’t matter. When Love gets into the open field, that’s a wrap.
“We have a saying: No cut’s the best cut,” McCullough said. “In that case, based on where the read went, no cut was the best cut. As soon as he got vertical on the sideline, he wasn’t going to get caught.”
Love’s own motto might be: No touch like the first one.
His first carry in peewee football went for a 90-yard touchdown.
After being slowed by a groin injury in the summer before his junior year at St. Louis’ Christian Brothers College High School, Love wasn’t expected to play in the opener against area powerhouse East St. Louis. On a sweltering night, Love told coach Scott Pingel, “Put me in.” The back’s first carry came on an outside counter play to the sideline. He slipped away from one defender and juked two others for a long touchdown.
“It was electric,” Jason Love said. “He sucked the air out of the whole stadium.”
Love’s run against East St. Louis stands out for Pingel, as do the five touchdowns (three rushing, two receiving) he had in the state championship at the University of Missouri’s Faurot Field. But Pingel also remembers a short gain by Love in the state semifinal when both opposing defensive tackles went unblocked.
“His ability to do things in small spaces, you have to slow the tape down to say, ‘Wow that’s amazing,'” Pingel said. “As a coach, I love his 3-yard runs. He always falls forward.”
Love uses different ways to get by defenders, including going over them. At New York’s Yankee Stadium on Nov. 23, he caught a short pass from Leonard and hurdled Army’s Donavon Platt for a 6-yard touchdown.
A week later, at USC, Love caught another short pass from Leonard then skied over USC’s Kamari Ramsey for a nice gain up the sideline. Even on a going-nowhere run against Indiana, Love stiff-armed a defender then tried the hurdle before being dropped for a loss.
“I have a lot of confidence to just try things out or do things that I want on the field,” Love said. “Last game, I wanted to hurdle somebody, so I was like, ‘F— it, let me try to hurdle,’ even though there were people behind him. Me playing with that freeness to be able do whatever I want to do has allowed me to make more explosive plays happen when the right look is there.”
Love has a track background. He won a state high school 100-meter title with a time of 10.76 seconds. But he never ran hurdles.
In high school football, hurdling is penalized.
“It resembles a hurdle, but I see long jumping,” James Gillespie, who coached Love in track at Christian Brothers, said of Love’s football aerials. “Especially the one he did against USC, if you look at that, he’s jumping off the left foot, which is what he did for us. I thought, ‘Long jump.’ The step, the cycle, hitch and a half, yeah, definitely.”
Love long jumped more than 21 feet in high school, and Gillespie thinks he could have gotten to 24 or 25. Like many who saw Love develop, Gillespie watched the run against Indiana with excitement but not surprise. As soon as Love turned the corner, Gillespie knew Love was gone, he said, “Unless Deion Sanders came out of retirement.”
Although Love’s recent wizardry has brought a bigger spotlight to his game, his favorite run of the season came late in the season opener at Texas A&M. After the two-minute timeout with the game tied at 13, Love waited for Schrauth and Flanagan to pull, scooted through the hole then shrugged off two defenders for a 21-yard touchdown — the game winner.
“Everything was on the line, really close game, two minutes left,” Love said. “The tight end made an amazing block, offensive line did their job, the receivers did their job. So, that play really was a culmination of teamwork and trusting each other and playing for each other. I was able to make an explosive play because everybody did their job.
“When that happens, great things happen.”
McCullough pinpoints the moment he felt Notre Dame would prevail in a competitive recruitment for Love. He had visited Love’s home in north St. Louis. Before entering Love’s room, McCullough saw shoes placed neatly outside on a mat.
“I said, ‘Hey, do I need to take my shoes off before I come in?'” McCullough said. “He said, ‘Nah, coach, I’m going to let you just go ahead and walk in.’ He took his own shoes off but let me walk in with mine on. I thought, ‘I must be in good shape.'”
The lined-up shoes and overall orderliness are central to Love’s personality. The gloves and towels in his Notre Dame locker are stacked perfectly. And if anyone removes Love’s athletic tape cutter, “You better put it back in the same spot, the same way,” said fellow Fighting Irish running back Aneyas Williams.
Growing up, Love would become upset when L’Tyona (pronounced Latonya) picked out his clothes for school because he wanted them a certain way. The same applied to food.
“Symmetry,” Jason Love said. “It has to be 1, 2, 3. It can’t be 1, 2, 4. It has to be in order.”
Jeremiyah was recruited by all the big-time programs, eventually narrowing his list to Texas A&M, Michigan, Oregon and Notre Dame and ultimately to Texas A&M and Notre Dame. His parents said Notre Dame’s smaller environment, along with Jeremiyah’s connection to McCullough, sealed the deal.
Still, they worried about Jeremiyah sharing a room and adjusting to being away from home.
“He’s so big on his space,” L’Tyona said. “It would interrupt his peace. We were a little worried at first when he got to Notre Dame, but he started to adjust.”
Williams also grew up in Missouri and first met Love at a state track meet. He could barely get a word out of Love. When they reunited at another track meet, Love said a little more.
Soon after Williams got to Notre Dame, though, the two grew closer.
“He was a big teacher for me,” Williams said. “He’s not a big talker, but a big thing for me was just working with him. Every day after practice, it’d be me and him on the Jugs machine, catching balls. There’s a lot about J-Love that you might not get to see, but he has a good personality.”
L’Tyona and Jason, both retired sergeants with the St. Louis Police Department, have seen their son grow at Notre Dame. When Jeremiyah was named offensive player of the year at Notre Dame’s annual Echoes Awards banquet, he delivered a “powerful message,” Williams said.
Before Friday’s game, he joked with the “College GameDay” crew about keeping his shirt on for warmups.
Jeremiyah and Jason are even working on a comic book that will chronicle Jeremiyah’s journey to be called “Jeremonstar” or “Yah Love.”
“He had to come out of his shell,” Jason said. “They always said, ‘Don’t change him. He’ll change the world.'”
Love’s “perfectionist” tendencies, as McCullough calls them, have their benefits on the football field. Highlight plays have always come easily for Love, who could dunk a basketball as an eighth grader and almost always was faster and more athletic than his peers.
But at Notre Dame, he has shown the refined focus to work toward becoming a total running back. He added about 20 pounds of what McCullough calls “physical armor” after his freshman season, when he averaged 5.4 yards per carry behind bruising back Audric Estime. Some college teams wanted Love to play cornerback or wide receiver coming out of high school, and he has improved in the slot, practicing with the receivers at times this spring to better understand coverages. He has tripled his receptions total from last season to 24, which ranks fourth on the team.
Love also has improved in the unflashy areas of his position.
“He’s really good in pass protection already,” McCullough said. “He’s a really good route runner. He’s improved his detail a whole lot as far as his run reads are concerned. He was an 88%, 89% guy in run reads. He’s at a 94%, 95% run read clip now. So, just him embracing all of the small details of being an upper-end player, because we know what his goal is.
“I’ve been there, I coached there, so I know what the NFL is about.”
McCullough, who coached with the Kansas City Chiefs as well as with college programs including USC and Indiana, has seen elements of Love’s game in previous protégés Tevin Coleman and Ronald Jones and even power backs such as Estime and Jordan Howard. The good news for Notre Dame is that it will have at least another full season with Love, who could be a Heisman Trophy contender in 2025 after leading the team with 1,057 rushing yards and 16 touchdowns this season.
But the immediate task is the CFP and a national title. He likely will top the scouting report for Georgia’s defense, which ranks 36th nationally against the run and has allowed a 100-yard rusher in four games this season. The Bulldogs have allowed 170 rushing yards or more five times. And they struggled during a two-week stretch against UMass (226 yards, two touchdowns) and Georgia Tech (260 yards, three touchdowns) before throttling Texas’ ground game for the second time this season in the SEC championship game.
“That was only 60 percent of Jeremiyah Love,” Jason said of his son’s performance against Indiana.
Love should be at or near full strength against Georgia. He’s the only FBS running back with a rushing touchdown in every game this season, also a Notre Dame record. Love has five 100-yard rushing performances and two other outings with more than 90 yards despite never eclipsing 16 carries in a game this fall.
“I play with confidence. I play free,” he said. “I’ve just been blessed with great ability. Whenever I’m able to make an explosive or do anything and help this team get stuff going, man, I just feel great.”
