SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Riley Leonard warmed up after the hour-long weather delay between the third and fourth quarters of Notre Dame’s blowout of Stanford. The quarterback had gone cold after the best start of his Irish career. And it all made sense. Because before Saturday, Leonard maintaining this temperature felt as likely as him needing a heat check at all.
Maybe Notre Dame didn’t want to push a good thing too far. Or maybe it had seen enough of Leonard looking like the quarterback it thought it was getting all along. Either way, Marcus Freeman made the decision to give Leonard the rest of the evening off, letting Steve Angeli put the final touches on a 49-7 demolition that opened eyes and turned heads. No warmup necessary.
Leonard’s day was done — 16-of-22 passing for 229 yards and three touchdowns, plus another score on the ground — having made the questions about Notre Dame’s quarterback quieter and quieter. It’s too reductive to say Leonard had this in him all along, that it was just a matter of time before it came out. Because it took the prodding and pulling of offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock to bring this version of Leonard to the surface, finally a dual-threat quarterback instead of a run-first one.
“You always hear the coaches say you practice like you play. Sometimes you shrug that off, all right, like I’ll be able to show up in the game time,” Leonard said. “But I think these last couple weeks we’ve had an emphasis on knowing who we want to be and striving to be that every day at practice. Those same plays we made out there, we probably made three times each in practice this week.”
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Notre Dame takeaways: Did Riley Leonard show Irish can win with offense?
If Denbrock called the game he needed to call at Texas A&M when he game planned to avoid the big mistake, the one he called against Stanford was the plan Notre Dame needs to make something of this season. The Irish couldn’t keep living without a vertical pass game or guessing what Leonard does best with his arm. If Denbrock started to figure it out against Louisville, what showed against Stanford was an awakening.
Leonard hit two run-pass option calls for touchdowns, the kind of read-and-react plays he’s struggled to nail. Against Stanford, he put the ball exactly where Kris Mitchell and Jayden Thomas needed it. Leonard was a threat on the ground, but Notre Dame held him to just six carries and just a few designed runs.
“What I challenged them to be, I wanted it to be unrecognizable,” Freeman said. “I wanted you all to watch and say, ‘Man, that’s an offense that we haven’t seen.’ Our players have seen it. It’s just them at their best on every play. That was what a reflection of what you guys saw. That’s what you saw today.”
Yes, Stanford is not a good football team. And all grades are made on a curve.
But what Notre Dame showed this weekend was the kind of stuff it had failed to put on tape against the rest of this schedule, hardly a series of taxing exams. Even the offensive explosion at Purdue felt like empty calories, fueled as much by the Boilermakers’ lack of competence as anything the Irish did well. That’s what made this different. The Cardinal might not be good defensively, but Notre Dame didn’t just out-athlete Stanford, it out-schemed it too. Explosive plays didn’t come from Jeremiyah Love breaking five tackles or Leonard being unable to be tackled.
Notre Dame’s defense has traveled all season — now ranked in the top 10 nationally in yards per play allowed, points per game allowed, pass-efficiency defense, third-down conversions and fourth-down conversions. In all five categories, it’s better this year than last, when it was elite in its own right. The point isn’t to compare, it’s that Notre Dame can rely on that defense to deliver week after week. Coordinator Al Golden has stacked up great performance after great performance.
Now it feels like the offense could join the party.
Leonard’s skill set and Denbrock’s call sheets no longer look like separate circles. Now they feel like an overlapping Venn diagram.
“You kind of had to learn the hard way, but I think we really understand each other now,” Leonard said. “There are plenty of early mornings before everyone gets into the facility where me and him are sitting down with coffee and bagels, eating and talking about life and then the game plan and things like that. We’ve really gotten to know each other really well.
“Every play, you talk about knowing the why every play. And I understand the why now of the plays that he’s called.”
Leonard is hardly the perfect quarterback. Notre Dame doesn’t expect him to be. It doesn’t need him to be, either, at least not during the season’s second half. He’ll continue to under throw deep shots like the ones to Beaux Collins and Jaden Greathouse. The Irish can live with that, just as long as Leonard continues to be willing to let it rip when the opportunity comes open.
Unlike on the interception that will live in infamy against Northern Illinois, Leonard looks like a quarterback who gets it now, and Denbrock looks like a coordinator who gets his quarterback.
Denbrock wrote a check last week when he said he expected Leonard to take the next step in his game because of how he’d practiced in recent weeks. It’s the kind of thing coaches sometimes say for the benefit of the player to push him forward. Other times, they say it because it’s actually true. In this case, it might have been both.
“Because of what I’ve seen him do out there on the practice field. I mean, it’s got to start there. It’s got to start somewhere. And that’s been as good as I’ve seen,” Denbrock said, four days before Stanford. “Last week and the week before, the way he practiced and threw the ball with confidence and the way people kind of like went, ‘Wow, that’s a dude.’ You know what I mean?
“That whole aura that’s surrounding him right now is really positive, and I think everybody’s kind of feeding off that.”
That sentiment now extends outside Notre Dame’s football facility, where the calls for a quarterback change have dropped to zero. This season will go as the quarterback goes, which for the first time since Leonard showed up feels promising for what could come.
“We’re getting closer. We’re getting closer. I told the team before the game, I know we’re getting closer because, you know, little things, man, are becoming big things,” Freeman said.
“It’s not about winning. It’s about making sure that we improve as much as we can, but I got a feeling this group is getting closer and closer to reaching our full potential. Today was a big step in that, and we’ve got to continue to make sure we’re taking steps forward.
“We’ll worry about what the result is at the end of the season. We just have to continue to stay in the moment and focus on getting better.”
Notre Dame has not hit that mark every week. It did on this Saturday. It could be the first of many.
(Photo: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
