How a Sugar Bowl scramble exemplified the best of Riley Leonard at Notre Dame
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David Hale, ESPN Staff Writer
The easiest way to understand why quarterback Riley Leonard has Notre Dame on the verge of its first national title game in more than a decade is to watch him run.
Really, any run will do. But perhaps the best — or at least, most recent — example is the run on third-and-7 with 5:53 left in the Allstate Sugar Bowl. The Irish were nursing a 23-10 lead, chewing up the final minutes in a game of keep-away, and Leonard needed a conversion. He took the snap, took a half-step forward, then tucked the ball and darted outside. He slid out of a tackle behind the line with a stiff-arm, then outran a defender to the perimeter. At the line to gain, he met Georgia star Malaki Starks head-on. Starks went low. Leonard leaped — flew almost — in a head-first jailbreak for the marker.
Leonard soared over Starks, landed 3 yards beyond the line-to-gain, popped up with the ball in his hand and signaled for the first down.
The crowd went wild. His teammates went wild. Leonard, the kid from a little town in southwest Alabama, at least reached something close to wild.
“Everybody keeps telling me to stop doing that,” Leonard said of the hard run. “I did it. And it worked out. But we’re in the playoffs, so it’s like — put your butt on the line.”
Notre Dame QB Riley Leonard flipped over him for the first down 😯 pic.twitter.com/p1JNgmQOCw
— ESPN (@espn) January 3, 2025
Notre Dame’s drive ate another four minutes off the clock, and after stuffing Georgia on downs, the Irish celebrated a Sugar Bowl win — their biggest victory in more than 30 years. Now, their next biggest game is a date with Penn State in the playoff semifinals on Thursday in the Capital One Orange Bowl (7:30 p.m. ET on ESPN).
Notre Dame is here for many reasons, but perhaps the biggest one is Leonard’s drive to win at all costs. Not that anyone doubted Leonard’s competitiveness when he arrived at Notre Dame in January as an injured transfer from Duke. But what he has shown in the past three months since the Irish last lost a football game — a loss Leonard took full responsibility for — is that he’ll put his butt, his shoulder, his head and anything else he needs to on the line if it means winning a football game.
“It’s in his DNA,” said offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock. “I knew he was a competitive guy. That’s a strong trait we knew he had. But it’s so much greater than I’d imagined. He’s a winner, and he brings people around him to his level. And I think that’s the biggest compliment you can give a quarterback.”
Those runs like the Sugar Bowl scramble are the height of playoff football, but Leonard has been doing this since he was young. He played some wide receiver growing up, and he loved going across the middle. He torments defenders at practice, teammate RJ Oben said, because he’ll run hard even wearing a noncontact jersey. He played baseball, too, and his father, Chad, jokes that Riley knew how to slide feet-first then, but he refuses to do it on the football field.
“I hold my breath waiting for him to get up,” said Heather Leonard, his mother, “but when they need something, he’s always going to get it.”
It’s the dichotomy of Riley’s approach. He is overlooked, polite, smiley and understated, and yet at the same time he’s utterly driven to win at a level even other players find hard to capture.
Perhaps that’s the secret to those runs. He’s underestimated, and he’s relentless.
“I don’t understand why I’m hard to tackle, honestly,” Leonard said. “I don’t have very good juke moves. I’m very tall. Not intimidating, at least on the field. But guys just miss.”
Plenty of people missed on Leonard coming out of high school.
Back in Fairhope, Alabama, he played football and baseball, but basketball was his passion. College basketball was the dream until COVID-19 hit and scuttled Leonard’s best opportunities to impress college recruiters. That’s when he started to seriously consider football as an alternative. Turns out, one of his coaches was pals with former Duke coach David Cutcliffe, who liked what he saw in Leonard. Duke was Leonard’s only FBS scholarship offer.
Leonard’s first college start came on Nov. 13, 2021. It was 17 degrees in Blacksburg, Virginia. Winds swirled, and the crowd was ferocious. Leonard was so out of sorts, he forgot his mouthguard leaving the locker room, then amid the team’s run onto the field for kickoff, he turned and retreated, pushing his way through a sea of charging teammates to retrieve it, like an overwhelmed performer retreating from the stage.
Leonard threw for just 84 yards in that game. Three weeks later, Cutcliffe was fired at Duke after the team finished 3-9. Mike Elko arrived for 2022, and Leonard opened fall camp that year in the midst of a QB competition, which he narrowly won before the opener.
He won that game. Then another. And he kept on winning.
Duke finished 2022 a surprising 9-4, Leonard started gaining legitimate attention from NFL scouts, and after upending Clemson in the 2023 opener, the attention reached a fever pitch.
None of it fazed the kid from Fairhope.
Back in his high school days, he began a tradition with his mom. He wanted to avoid the pitfalls of success and stay grounded in the work, so he asked her to text him with the same message before every game: “You suck.” He now wears a green wristband with the same words. Leonard’s biggest fear has always been forgetting how hard it is to win. Appreciating the difficulty is his secret weapon.
Football delivered another reminder of its fickle nature just as the wave of Riley-mania reached its zenith in Durham. Duke was 4-0, and Leonard had the Blue Devils on the brink of a program-defining win over Notre Dame. But the Irish broke a late run to take the lead, Leonard injured his ankle in a failed comeback attempt, and over the next eight months, he struggled to get back on the field, endured three surgeries, and ultimately transferred to South Bend, joining the program that had effectively ended his miraculous run at Duke.
For Leonard, Notre Dame represented a chance to finish his college career at a level that might have seemed unimaginable when it began.
“I wanted an opportunity to reach my potential as a player,” he said. “I’m at a point in my career now where I have the most confidence in my game. I understand this offense probably more than any offense I’ve ever been in.”
It didn’t start out that way though.
Notre Dame opened its season with a hard-fought win over Texas A&M, but one in which Leonard and the offense struggled to move the ball through the air. A week later, the one-dimensional attack proved costly. Northern Illinois‘ defense utterly flummoxed Leonard, and the Huskies stunned Notre Dame 16-14. It was arguably the biggest upset of the college football season, and any hopes for the playoff were on life support.
That version of Riley Leonard looked lost.
“I don’t even think I’d recognize the player that was playing earlier on in the season,” he said recently.
Leonard isn’t into making excuses, but he had missed all of spring practice and much of the summer. He simply hadn’t had enough reps with his new team. He was frustrated — even if he rarely let it show, Heather said.
“That was one of the hardest weeks of his life,” Heather said. “It definitely took a toll on him, but he also knew he had to move on.”
Leonard promised his team he’d be better. He took the blame for the loss, and he assured his teammates he’d approach the rest of the season the same way he does those third-down runs. He would leave nothing in the tank.
“He took it on his shoulders,” said tight end Mitchell Evans. “You could see it in the way he practices, his mindset, his confidence — he has grown in a remarkable way. That’s what you have to do to be the Notre Dame quarterback.”
After four games, Leonard had yet to throw a touchdown pass in a Notre Dame uniform.
But in the 10 games since, Leonard has completed 68% of his throws, has an 81.1 Total QBR, and has 17 touchdown passes to just four picks. And the 13-1 Irish haven’t lost again.
“Riley has shaken off the ‘he’s just a runner’ thing people were saying about him,” said tailback Jeremiyah Love, “and we’re more explosive in the passing game. The running game is better than it was, and the offensive line has come together. We’re way better now.”
And so what if it was still a run — a hard, physical, acrobatic run — that served as Leonard’s highlight in Notre Dame’s biggest win of the year? He was hurting after the NIU loss because he felt like he had let his team down, but he had never listened to any of the criticism about his arm. He said he doesn’t care how he’s perceived.
“The moment I start to say I need to throw this many yards or score this many touchdowns is when I get off track,” he said. “My job is to win the football game however that may look.”
He is two victories away from claiming his place among the greatest winners in the history of one of college football’s most storied programs. That’s a long way from the basketball courts in Fairhope.
But Leonard has never paid much attention to how far off his destination might seem. He likes to dream big, and if there are obstacles in his way, well, Georgia’s defenders found out how that goes.
The one thing that has changed in the waning moments of his unlikely college football career is Leonard is trying to take some time to reflect.
“I don’t think I would’ve written the story any differently,” Leonard said. “It’s cool now to go back and look at it. I don’t really do that too often, but I’m very proud of the person I’ve grown into.”
He still hasn’t watched film from that NIU game, but he said he will once the year’s over, because it’s a moment he now cherishes, one that helped him get to where he is now. It’s supposed to be difficult, he said. That’s what makes it fun.
“I try to remind myself to appreciate it — like, you’re living your dream,” he said. “I don’t want to live my dream and then end up thinking you shouldn’t have taken that for granted. But moments like these make me appreciate it.”
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Pete Thamel
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Pete Thamel
Senior College Sports Insider
- College Football Senior Writer for ESPN. Insider for College Gameday.
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Jake Trotter
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Jake Trotter
ESPN Senior Writer
- Jake Trotter covers college football for ESPN. He joined ESPN in 2011. Before that, he worked at The Oklahoman, Austin American-Statesman and Middletown (Ohio) Journal newspapers. You can follow him @Jake_Trotter.
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