Riley Leonard Brings A New Dimension To The Notre Dame Offense

Notre Dame landed a pair of new quarterbacks this week. Technically, one is old and one is new. But by landing uber talented incoming freshman CJ Carr and veteran Duke transfer Riley Leonard, the Fighting Irish have a firm grasp on both their short- and long-term future at the most important position on a football field.

Leonard and Carr both made their commitments to Marcus Freeman and the Irish this week when they signed their National Letters of Intent at the start of the early signing period. Carr is already on campus and practicing with Notre Dame during its Sun Bowl preparations while Leonard is actually still with his old team as the Blue Devils prepare to play Troy in this Saturday’s Birmingham Bowl.

"He is an unbelievable teammate,” Freeman gushed when asked about Leonard. "He's still with his team at Duke and he’s going to be with them until they finish their bowl game and he’s not even playing right now. He knows he’s not playing but he wants to be with those guys and finish off the season. So, that speaks volumes of who he is as a person. He makes those guys around him better. Those can be through his actions in terms of leadership but also through his decision making. So, he is a great young person. He is a great young man. Great parents but a special football player.”

Leonard is also a football player whose skillset brings a different dimension to Notre Dame’s offense than they have had in recent years. In 13 games last season the rising senior passed for 2,967 yards with 20 touchdowns and completed 64% of his passes while also running for 699 yards and 13 yards on the ground.

"He's a complete quarterback,” Freeman said of Leonard. "Number one, he’s competitive. I don’t want that to be a word that’s just okay thrown out there lightly. That’s something that I have a lot of respect for, how competitive you are, and you see it by the way he plays. In short yardage situations, the ability to put his shoulder down and say ‘I’m not going to be denied. But then in the passing game he can make every single throw.

"He's accurate but he also can extend plays with his legs and now he has a true ability to make you respect him by pulling the ball in some of those zone read situations,” Freeman continued. "So, what it does is put the defense at conflict. You're not just saying ‘hey, we’ll react to the quarterback keeping the ball’. You have to have a man, a defender, accounting for the quarterback. So, what does that do? It opens up things in the passing game because you’ve got an extra defender trying to stop the run with a quarterback. So, I think that to me is an important factor when you talk about offenses. When you have the ability to run the ball as a quarterback it puts the defense in conflict and in difficult situations.”

Leonard’s numbers were down this year, but he was sidelined for five games by ankle and toe injuries. He threw for 1,102 yards with just three touchdowns and ran for 352 yards and four touchdowns. He had his best career yards per carry average at 6.1 in 58 attempts this season.

Tyler Buchner might have hit Leonard’s 2022 rushing total of 699 yards if he had stayed healthy for a full season in 2022, but this year’s transfer quarterback, Sam Hartman, ran for just 123 yards in 12 games. The offense the Irish would have ran with Buchner was different than the one it ran with Hartman at the helm this season.

The offense they’ll run next year with Leonard is likely to look dramatically different than the one they ran this year with Hartman. It begs the question, was Leonard brought to Notre Dame to run the Irish offense because of or in spite of his unique skillset?

"He was the best quarterback that we believe was in the portal,” Freeman responded to the inquiry. "To me, you get the best players first and then you say ‘Okay, how do we tailor what we do around those guys’ and that is so important. So, we weren’t looking for a pocket passer, we weren’t looking for a dual threat guy. We were saying ‘Okay, as we look to take another guy, a quarterback, to add to this program, who’s the best one that fits this place?’ I’ve always said that, right. The best one that fits this place and then how do we tailor what we do offensively around those guys. So, I think that’s the situation more than anything with Riley.”