The Road to the CFP National Championship

December and January flew by in a blur of playoff football, but now that I’ve had time to recover from the chaos of the championship, I wanted to share how we maximized college football’s biggest stage on our institutional accounts.

From the moment it was announced that Notre Dame would host Indiana at home in the first round, we knew we had to make a splash—without coming off too cocky.

That December 20 game wasn’t just another matchup; it was history. It was the first-ever postseason game played on a college campus, our first Friday home game since 1900, and the first home game after the semester had ended. The list of "firsts" went on and on.

We knew we wanted our content to be focused on our students. After all, we had adjusted the final exam schedule and kept dorms open for an extra 24 hours before Christmas break just so they could be there to cheer on the Irish.

But coming up with a creative angle after a long semester? That was tough. After brainstorming for a while, we turned to ChatGPT, asking for a prompt that combined the holidays with playoff football.

It gave us:

'Twas the Night Before Playoffs, and all through the Dome, Not a creature was stirring, the Irish were home ...

That was our a-ha moment.

Over the next few hours, we shouted rhymes back and forth, refining lines while keeping key lines intact to preserve the magic of the original story. (i.e. "the staff in their caps" and "arose such a clatter")

Before moving forward, we checked with our athletics team just to make sure we wouldn’t get sued for using the word "playoffs," similar to how brands can't say the words "Super Bowl."

And then came the hard part:

We had to find 28 students who wouldn’t mind being featured … in the middle of finals week … during the coldest temperatures of the season so far.

We had high hopes of grabbing students on the quad, but on the first day of filming, the temperatures barely cracked 25 degrees, so we had to get creative. We camped out at the dining hall and student centers, then made a second trip to capture outdoor shots when the weather warmed up.

We also grabbed time with our new university president whose surprise appearance became one of the video’s biggest highlights. His delivery of the iconic closing lines tied everything together perfectly:

“So here’s to the Irish, their moment in sight, Merry Playoffs to all, and to all a good night!”

At 8 p.m. on December 19, the night before the playoff game, we hit send, posting to Facebook, Instagram, X, and YouTube Shorts to capture the essence of a bedtime story being read to children.

The results?

?? 1.25 million impressions

?? 925,520 views

?? 102,000+ engagements (including 17,000+ shares)

The video had a resurgence on Facebook in particular before the Sugar Bowl, Orange Bowl, and National Championship games.

This one was for our students. But with even more eyes on the National Championship, we knew we wanted to focus on our institution.

Stay tuned—more on that soon!