Pete Bevacqua may be in his first year as Notre Dame Athletic Director but he knows his way around campus just fine as a 1993 graduate and an avid fan since he was a kid.

Since becoming AD, he’s started each Irish home game day with a run around the Notre Dame lakes before the campus wakes up for the day. He might be thinking about everything he has to accomplish but he’s likely thinking most about how to get his alma mater to win it all again in football.

“Notre Dame football is a priority and winning national championships is a priority,” Bevacqua said Tuesday in his first full scale press conference as the Notre Dame Athletic Director. “I said this to Marcus [Freeman] and we were laughing, we are both kind of manically obsessed with winning a national championship and more in football.”

That’s why it was an ‘easy’ decision for Bevacqua and Notre Dame brass to sign Freeman to a new year 6 year contract after the Notre Dame head coach guided the Irish into the 1st ever 12-team College Football Playoff in his 3rd season. Bevacqua says the new deal has no ‘carve outs’ for the NFL or other colleges (such as Freeman’s alma mater Ohio State).

“Thrilled about the new agreement with Marcus,” Bevacqua said. “We all think the world of him. The job he has done here at Notre Dame on the field and off the field—you think about the improvement he has made now in his 3rd year. If you were in my position, just to see the way he interacts with our student athletes. It’s just amazing the bond he’s created with them. The way they can relate to him. The way he relates to them.”

Bevacqua says the two most visible people at Notre Dame are the President and the head football coach.

“There’s no better representative of Notre Dame,” Bevacqua says of Freeman. “He’s so authentic, so sincere. Everything that makes Notre Dame different and special and some would say harder, he embraces and uses as an advantage and a differentiator.”

Freeman has shown himself to care about others more than himself in conversations with Bevacqua about the future. Bevacqua says every chat was about helping the program to get better or how to ensure they had the best resources possible to land the best assistant coaches possible.

“The culture he’s created with his coaches and players, it’s special,” Bevacqua continues. “We have a ton of momentum.”

Bevacqua adds that they wanted the season to play out before finalizing a contract extension but also wanted to get it done and out of the way before the playoffs begun so that it would not turn into a distraction.

No one might be more excited for the playoffs to arrive than Bevacqua as Notre Dame will host Indiana Friday at 8pm in the 1st ever playoff game on a college campus. Hosting a playoff game has been the goal for Notre Dame since this new 12-team format was announced.

“Our expectation is that it’s going to sound like a Notre Dame football home game, it’s going to feel like a Notre Dame football home game,” Bevacqua says. “We are going to hand out these neat towels that are blue and gold/yellow but like the ‘Play like a Champion’ sign and will also commemorate this great first at Notre Dame. There aren’t many opportunities to have firsts at Notre Dame. We’ve done so much and accomplished so much across the university and certainly on the football field, but this is a first. I think the community is excited. I think the country is excited. We couldn’t be more thrilled and more pleased of what we have to look forward to here in a few days.”

While it’s going to look and feel like a Notre Dame home game, there will be some differences. The College Football Playoff will have its own messaging playing on the videoboards and Indiana will be introduced to the field with its own video. IU has 3,500 tickets allotted by the CFP—1,500 of those will be clustered together in the lower portion of stadium.

Bevacqua points to the Winter Classic as an example of events Notre Dame Stadium has hosted in wintry conditions.

“It’s going to be cold—but we are used to cold,” Bevacqua explains. “It’s going to snow but we are used to snow. A lot of people have asked, ‘hey is the Stadium ready for that? Is Notre Dame ready for that?’ The university has been amazing. [University President] Fr. Bob [Dowd] of course but Shannon Cullinan, Mike Seamon, Jon McGreevy our Provost—the whole campus has rallied around this event.”

One of the ways Notre Dame has rallied around the event is the way they’ve adjusted things for students.

“We had to change the exam schedule and that’s not easy to do at Notre Dame,” Bevacqua concedes. “We had to keep the dorms open for another 24 hours. We didn’t want to host a CFP game with our students taking exams that day or without them at all.”

Students only had to pay $25 for a ticket and every student who wanted a ticket got one.

“It’s a special wonderful moment for Notre Dame,” Bevacqua said. “People always ask me what’s the best sporting event I’ve ever been to and I’ve been lucky because of what I’ve done professionally—but I have always had an easy #1. I graduated in the spring of 1993 and came back in the fall of 1993 for the great Florida State game with Charlie Ward. That’s where my expectations are for Friday—that type of atmosphere where it felt like the whole country was focused singularly on a sporting event. I think because we are the first game, because we are in Notre Dame Stadium, because it’s going to be this great intrastate game in primetime on a Friday, I think it really has a chance to be a spectacular moment in sports and hopefully a spectacular moment in Notre Dame sports history.”

Bevacqua will likely be dreaming about how special of a night it could be when he’s running around the lakes in the frigid cold Friday morning.