The Notre Dame Fighting Irish and the Ohio State Buckeyes meet in the college football national championship on Monday night, and only one team could be the winner.

It will mark the end of the first-ever expanded College Football Playoff. Neither team came into the tournament favored, and each team had to scratch and claw their way to get to the championship game. It will certainly be a scrap at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, but some of the top talent from each team has expressed at least one common thing to bring them together: their faith.

Notre Dame quarterback Riley Leonard, Ohio State quarterback Will Howard, running back TreVeyon Henderson and wide receiver Emeka Egbuka have all talked about their belief in God in the days leading up to the game.

“I truly think things happen for a reason, not only us, but Ohio State as well. I think we’re the two main teams to just publicly display our faith the most,” he told reporters last week, per Sports Michiana. “I don’t know if this is some divine teaching, you know, who put us here. 

“I truly believe that Jesus was looking over both our shoulders throughout the [whole] season and put these two teams on a pedestal for a reason.”

Howard talked about his belief in God after the team’s upset win over Oregon in the Rose Bowl.

“First and foremost, I got to thank my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, for giving me this opportunity to be on this stage in the Rose Bowl,” Howard told ESPN. “Younger me would be in awe right now.”

Egbuka talked to Sports Spectrum during the season about how faith affected his performance on the field.

“I would say for the past couple years we’ve kinda been – there’s kind of been a number of players on the football team who have restored their faith in Jesus Christ. And that was something that was big for me my freshman year,” the star receiver told the outlet in November. 

Emeka Egbuka of the Ohio State Buckeyes celebrates after scoring a touchdown in the second quarter against the Indiana Hoosiers at Ohio Stadium on Nov. 23, 2024, in Columbus, Ohio. (Jason Mowry/Getty Images)

Egbuka, a graduate student, recalled in his interview the turning point for him. He was invited to attend Mass by his fellow teammates and said it was the first time he had felt a true connection to his faith. 

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“Ever since then, my life has been changed. A complete 180, and I have a similar testimony to a lot of players on the team. We’ve been praying for a type of revival like this on our team, and we decided to share with everybody what God has been doing on our football team.” 

Egbuka said he opted against going into the NFL Draft last season because he felt a calling that was “bigger” than football.

Henderson told the outlet in a separate interview that despite his standout rookie season, which included success and NIL deals, he had turned to his faith after an injury. 

“He saved my life from going down that road of destruction. He saved me. He put me on this path of everlasting life … you see so many people go down that large path of destruction, but I’m so thankful that Jesus, He rescued me from that path and put me on His path.”

Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman reinstated pregame Mass when he took over in 2021. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman reinstated pregame Mass when he took over for Brian Kelly in 2021. He was baptized into the Catholic Church in and received his first Holy Communion in September 2022.

Freeman credited Notre Dame for encouraging the student body to grow their faith.

“It’s not only in Catholicism. It’s the reality of you having a faith and a belief in something bigger than yourself,” he said.

Come Monday night, each team will have a prayer and then lock in for the final 60 minutes of their season.

Fox News’ Paulina Dedaj, Chantz Martin and Peter Burke contributed to this report.

JJ Redick, on multiple occasions this season, has spoken about his belief in being process-oriented. It’s a necessary tool for any athlete, and especially one who earned his NBA fortune as a shooter while missing more threes than he made. If, Redick has said, he knew he was putting in the right kind of work, he could be at peace with the result after the ball left his hand.

He reiterated it before the Lakers played the Clippers on Sunday, and in the aftermath of their lopsided 116-102 loss at the Intuit Dome, he mentioned it again.

“Every time we made a mistake they made us pay. But our guys competed. We fought. We stayed together,” the Lakers coach said after the loss. “This is for us, this was a good process for us. We didn’t get the result we wanted.”

But that message isn’t resonating inside a locker room that had grown frustrated with the Lakers’ inconsistencies, with LeBron James saying the team’s roster construction is the reason for its razor thin margin for error.

Asked if there were ways for the Lakers to increase those margins, internally, James was blunt.

“Nah,” he said. “That’s how our team is constructed. We don’t have room for error — for much error.”

In a follow-up, James was asked if the Lakers had to play near-perfect basketball most nights to win. And again, James basically said the roster flaws demanded it.

“We don’t have a choice,” James said. “I mean… that’s the way our team is constructed. And we have to, we have to play close-to-perfect basketball.”

James’ comments could’ve maybe been written off as frustration after the Lakers lost for the fourth time in their last six games, but Redick also was being realistic about the team’s chances each time it plays. Asked about a stretch of schedule that saw the Lakers in Los Angeles for 10 of 12 games (the Lakers are currently 5-5 during it), it was hard to tell if he was being optimistic or fatalistic.

“You can certainly look at a calendar and say this is an easier part of the schedule or this is a more difficult part. Nothing is going to be easy for our team. And I figured that out very early in the season,” Redick said before shifting tone. “And that’s OK. We’re going to keep fighting. … We have 18 losses, so by the loss column, we’re sixth. We would like to be higher. I think there’s a couple games where we would all say we should have won. We haven’t had any of those games where you’re like, ‘Well, we kind of stole that one.’ We’re going to get a couple back at some point. We just got to continue to trust each other and we’ll be fine.”

The numbers, Redick said, are the numbers. Despite being 22-18, the Lakers have a negative point differential — and not a particularly close one. At minus-2.6 points, only Utah, New Orleans and Portland have been worse.

“We don’t have a huge margin for error. Nor can we create that margin organically,” Redick said. “It has to be emphasized daily to touch the paint, to play paint-to-great mentality, make the extra pass. We don’t have a guy on our team that’s going to necessarily always draw two to the ball. We don’t have a guy on our team that’s going to be able to get past his guy one-on-one and get to the paint and spread it out to the perimeter.

“Like, that’s just not our team. So we have to do it through connectivity, through execution. And when we do that, we’re really good.”

And when the Lakers don’t?

They end up in a mood like they were Sunday night, asking themselves the big questions that have kept them, in the words of one longtime NBA scout who watched the Lakers this week, “stuck.”

Lindsey Vonn crashed out of a World Cup Super-G race on Sunday while on pace for her best finish so far in her comeback to alpine skiing.

The American star was tracking toward a podium spot in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy — on the hill that will host the 2026 Olympics — when she went down onto her left side coming around a turn just over 50 seconds into her run and spun in the snow. She slammed her pole in frustration, got up on her own power, and skied down the hill, waving to the crowd at the bottom.

Vonn, one of 10 skiers who didn’t finish Sunday, had the 10th fastest split in the first sector of the race and fourth quickest in the second. She was just a half-second off the lead at that point — a pace that would’ve netted her a top-three position had she kept it up through the finish. Italy’s Federica Brignone won in 1:21.64, with the Swiss pair of Lara Gut-Behrami (1:22.22) and Corinne Suter (1:22.72) rounding out the podium.

“I definitely made some mistakes on the top, but I got a little bit behind the course and tried to pull it off,” Vonn told reporters after the race. “Then my skis kind of clicked together and I lost my balance.”

The Super-G crash was her second of the weekend after Vonn also went down during downhill training on Thursday.

It was Vonn’s fifth race back on the World Cup circuit since announcing an unlikely return to the sport after nearly six years away. Injuries drove her to retire in 2019, but a knee replacement in 2024 left her feeling pain-free and planning a comeback. She returned in December and finished 14th in a Super-G in St. Moritz, Switzerland, then took sixth in downhill and fourth in Super-G last week in St. Anton, Austria. On Saturday in Cortina, Vonn finished 20th in downhill.

A three-time Olympic medalist, including gold in the downhill at the 2010 Vancouver Games, Vonn holds the all-time record with 12 World Cup wins at Cortina d’Ampezzo, which will host the 2026 Games on the Olympia delle Tofane track that is a regular stop on the women’s tour.

In a post on X later Sunday, Vonn didn’t seem all that deterred by the rough weekend at one of her favorite venues.

“S— happens,” she wrote. “On to the next race.”

Jacqueline Wiles was the top American in Saturday’s downhill, finishing seventh. Lauren Macuga, the rising 22-year-old who won the St. Anton Super-G for her first World Cup race win, was the top U.S. finisher Sunday, taking 13th.

Vonn’s fourth-place finish in St. Anton made her the oldest woman to finish that high in a World Cup race. The 34-year-old Brignone, who now has four victories this season, is the oldest to ever win a World Cup race.

The strong results have brought Vonn back into the picture at the sport’s highest level. She’s 17th in the World Cup downhill standings and 14th in Super-G. Last week, Vonn told the Associated Press that she would retire again after the 2026 Olympics, if she makes the U.S. team there. The Olympic women’s alpine skiing program is slated to begin Feb. 8, 2026.

The World Cup speed skiing circuit heads to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, next weekend, where Vonn is again scheduled to compete in the downhill and Super-G. After that, the World Cup schedule pauses for the world championships in Saalbach, Austria, which begin Feb. 4.

GO DEEPER

Lindsey Vonn, at historic stop for women’s alpine, kicks off her World Cup return

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(Photo of Lindsey Vonn during Sunday’s Super-G: Mattia Ozbot / Getty Images)