Back at Duke, Riley Leonard’s mom used to text him every week to say “You suck.” The rationale was that with so much praise being directed Leonard’s way, the quarterback needed someone to keep his ego in check, like those stories about sages flanking ancient generals during parades, to keep them humble. ESPN got a lot of mileage out of this story last year. NBC will have no use for it this season. Riley Leonard’s mother will no longer be alone in telling Notre Dame’s starting quarterback that he sucks.
As many did, we talked ourselves into Leonard. We acknowledged the concerns about his passing accuracy and we acknowledged how unproven he was, but if he was good enough for Mike Denbrock, who just coached Jayden Daniels at LSU, we reasoned he was good enough for us. His poise and his character were both assets, and his tough running was aided by such a physical frame that we thought highly of his arm strength. In College Station, he looked exactly as advertised: His throws were inaccurate, once almost disastrously, but he accepted the moment, was not intimidated by it, and led the offense to a serviceable performance in a game where it merely needed to be serviceable. He even made those two big throws on the game-winning drive. We harbored our concerns and said as much, but we believed in Riley Leonard as we settled in to watch him improve over the next three weeks of what should have been tune-up games.
The second interception was the worst play of the game. It was the worst play in a long time for the Fighting Irish. I’m struggling to remember a single play that was worse. It was a devastating decision (Leonard had two receivers open on the other side of the first down line but chose to throw deep) executed poorly (Leonard underthrew the pass by almost ten yards). The second interception was the play where Riley Leonard lost Notre Dame the football game.
You can fault Denbrock for giving his quarterback an opportunity to do something so unbelievably stupid, but the idea behind the play seems simple: If Kris Mitchell beat his man, Leonard could go for the home run ball and the dagger, making sure to err on the side of missing with an overthrow. If Mitchell found himself in double coverage, as he did, Leonard could check down to Mitchell Evans or Jadarian Price, keeping the clock and the chains moving as the Irish marched towards an escape. That playcall is only a problem if the coordinator can’t trust his quarterback to execute a very basic decision. Leonard did not execute a very basic decision. Leonard did not check down to Evans or to Price. Should Denbrock have trusted him? If he shouldn’t have, then Steve Angeli should be the first-string QB.
Hopefully, Riley Leonard doesn’t suck. Hopefully the man Notre Dame boosters are assumed to have paid seven figures to come to South Bend isn’t bad at football. Hopefully this was one play. One unbelievably bad play, one of the most consequentially bad plays in nearly 150 years of Notre Dame football, but still only one play. Hopefully Leonard was more banged up than he realized and thought he’d put at least ten more yards of juice on that pass. Hopefully he understands his mistake, never makes it again, and plays within himself this weekend in West Lafayette. We can live with inaccurate Leonard. We can even live with inconsistent Leonard, if that’s what he turns out to be. But we cannot live with a Riley Leonard who sucks. No matter what benching him would do to what might be a tenuous supply of NIL funds, we cannot sit a limited but seemingly competent Angeli and a high-potential Kenny Minchey behind a quarterback who sucks.
A word about that possibly shaky NIL environment:
Notre Dame’s NIL effort has come under fire in the early stages of the NIL era. We’ve criticized it here a lot. The conventional wisdom holds that it’s come around. The evidence? Notre Dame landed Sam Hartman and Riley Leonard through the transfer portal and is rumored to be ready to match Auburn dollar-for-dollar in the race for Deuce Knight, a composite five-star currently playing for George County High School in Lucedale, Mississippi. If Knight goes to Auburn, reports hold it will not be because of a lack of effort by Notre Dame boosters.
These are good developments. They’re a good sign. But the focus on quarterbacks is interesting.
The mainstream way to think about NFL quarterbacks is that they determine how good a team is. That thinking is too black-and-white, of course, but the degree to which it’s too black-and-white is probably underestimated. Quarterback is the most important position. But it’s not the only position.
In college, it’s easy to take this even further. That old John Madden adage that “If you have two quarterbacks, you have none”? It didn’t really apply in the 2017 season for national champion Alabama. Of course, it’s easier when those quarterbacks are Jalen Hurts and Tua Tagovailoa. But in 2021 relief appearances against Wisconsin and Cincinnati, Drew Pyne didn’t play worse than Jack Coan. With a whole bunch of defensive help, Pyne got the job done against the Badgers, and had Kevin Austin caught that pass, Pyne might have beaten Cincinnati as well. Coan and Pyne weren’t world-beaters, but that’s the point: They generally played rather well anyway. Notre Dame went 11–2, and in its second loss, Coan threw for five hundred yards.
I’m trying to say this: I’m not sure you need a great quarterback. Having a great quarterback is great, but it’s not as important as it is in the pros, and its importance in the pros is probably already overstated. Why does that matter? Because if Notre Dame has finite NIL resources, we’d be better served using the resources we used on Leonard on offensive linemen and linebackers, where dollars go further. The dropoff from Leonard to Angeli doesn’t appear large. The dropoff from Hartman to Pyne doesn’t look enormous in hindsight. The dropoff from Zeke Correll to this year’s unit is big.
I don’t know what went wrong with Correll. I don’t know if money alone could have salvaged that situation, or if the hinted off-field disagreement between Correll and the staff risked creating a major problem in the locker room. I do know that on Saturday, I would have rather had Zeke Correll in that offensive line than Riley Leonard throwing picks behind it.
This overemphasis on quarterbacks should be the fault of the coaching staff, and if it is, the rejuvenation of the QB room should solve it, provided Marcus Freeman’s staff can hold onto some solid combination of Minchey, Knight, and CJ Carr. My worry, though, is that Notre Dame boosters won’t spend the same quantity of money if it isn’t being spent on quarterbacks. I’m worried about a dynamic where the football program is saying, “We need $1.5 million to sign this baby-faced quarterback ESPN raved about when we played Duke last fall. He’s a small-town kid, he’s a great student, and we think you’re really going to like him,” and the boosters saying “Yes” only to say “What about $750K?” when the football program says, “We need $1.5 million to sign a bunch of great kids who’ll block for Jeremiyah Love and make Miller Moss’s life hell in November.” I might be unnecessarily worried. I might not be giving Notre Dame’s boosters enough credit. It’s their money, not mine. But I’m worried about this. I’m also worried about fears of booster disappointment in their investment leading Freeman’s staff to stick with Leonard longer than they should.
Again, ideally Leonard pulls it together. Ideally he’s healthy and he doesn’t do the terribly dumb thing he did ever again. Ideally he’s as willing to run the ball and Denbrock’s as willing to run him as both were on that opening drive, the best six and a half minutes of the day. Leonard came to Notre Dame to make a lot of money and improve his NFL stock, but Notre Dame acquired Leonard in order to win. The Tim Tebow offense isn’t going to help Leonard’s NFL cause, but to be fair, neither is letting him hand victories to Northern Illinois.
Ideally, Leonard doesn’t suck.
But he sure sucked on Saturday.
The offensive line was bad as well. Losing Joe Alt to the NFL is a good problem to have, but Correll’s departure further gutted the unit, and it’s easy to play the what-if game with Charles Jagusah’s pec. I’m not worried about the line in the long run. There’s enough talent and physical giftedness there to pull it together by next year, and I’m perfectly content with Joe Rudolph’s tenure so far. But kind of like the quarterback situation which made the Hartman pursuit so enticing, the o-line room got caught off-cycle.
The defense was a weird kind of problem. It allowed one touchdown. That touchdown came on a bizarre play, one where Kyngstonn Viliamu-Asa got beat in coverage by a running back from the slot and Benjamin Morrison went for the pick instead of breaking up the pass and NIU successfully led Jaylen Sneed to a space 15 feet past the hash marks with the entire play beyond him. Morrison’s the easiest one to blame there, and he should have broken up the pass, but I don’t really know what Sneed was doing. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m guessing it wasn’t intentional for Notre Dame to have a linebacker hanging out in the flat while Xavier Watts covered the second tight end. Either way, Morrison missed the breakup and Watts was too far away to get (the electric) Antario Brown before he reached the goal line. A strange, strange play. Besides it, the defense didn’t achieve terrible results, but they got away with a few more busted plays, they got nickled and dimed, they failed to generate a key turnover (despite Watts’s genius attempt to throw one back in bounds), and in the most concerning development, they lost at the line of scrimmage on NIU’s game-winning field goal drive following the thoroughly discussed Leonard pick. Bill Connelly’s SP+, which is very good at what it does, still has the defense the 12th-best unit in the country. The defense should be fine.
Speaking of SP+…it has the Irish 15th in the country as a football team. Movelor errs on the side of underreacting, but it has Notre Dame ranked 9th. FPI says 10th. Are all three underreacting? Maybe. Maybe Notre Dame is really bad. But these models are all calibrated to something, and betting markets—more accurate than all three—still have ND favored by double digits against Purdue. The team should still be pretty good.
What about NIU? Because it is no longer the preseason, it is impossible to know whether the AP Poll is trying to measure how good a team is or how accomplished it is or how many tears its head coach shed in a beautiful postgame interview, but it says NIU was a top-25 opponent even as its voters call the defeat entirely inexcusable (one of those two things is correct). NIU isn’t really a playoff contender, as much as I’d hoped in the aftermath that could be the case. SP+ has them 84th, FPI has them 74th, and Movelor has them 96th once you take out the FCS teams. Now…that’s good enough for 2nd/1st/5th in the MAC. NIU could conceivably win the MAC and, with a road win over hopefully-ranked Notre Dame, end the season in the College Football Playoff top 25. This, despite only being a top-75 team or something of that sort. The Huskies still have to play NC State in Raleigh, though, probably as a two or three-score underdog, and our model grades their playoff chance a mere 1-in-40. This is unlikely to actually become a respectable loss.
Considering we lost the game we lost, Notre Dame does still have a great playoff chance. Again, Movelor’s a little higher than the consensus, and it’s lower on USC, but even if its stated 39% Irish playoff probability is too generous, the chance is still likely better than 1-in-4. In simulations where ND goes 11–1, they make the playoff 89% of the time. When they go 10–2, that number only drops to 30%. The issue with this is that making the playoff is no longer a huge accomplishment or a sign of progress for Notre Dame. For a long time, it was. But Brian Kelly, for his many significant flaws, built this program into one that should expect to make the 12-team playoff more often than not. What Marcus Freeman has to do, hard though it may be, is get Notre Dame into that tier currently occupied by Georgia, Ohio State, and Texas—the category of college football program that can expect to win a national championship. We knew we weren’t going to be there this year. We openly hoped on great play and a bunch of breaks getting us to the national championship game, but we knew we weren’t on the level of Georgia, Ohio State, and Texas. The problem now is that we aren’t sure we’re on the level of Penn State, Mississippi, and Tennessee. On Saturday, we were on the level of Northern Illinois.
Setting aside Leonard’s decision. Setting aside Sneed’s thorough coverage of the unoccupied flat. Setting aside NIU making its kicks while we got ours blocked (trying a fatalistic 62-yarder in the process). The fact that this is a program which can lose to NIU, respect NIU though we may, is a terrible indictment of Marcus Freeman’s performance. We love Marcus Freeman. Like nearly everyone else around Notre Dame, we want him to succeed. But three of his nine career losses have come at home against unacceptable opponents. Three more—the Louisville blowout, the Oklahoma State choke, and the Ohio State 10-men-on-the-field incident—came in unacceptable fashion. Only the road losses to Ohio State, USC, and Clemson are understandable, and we’re on the charitable side of the room when it comes to that Clemson game. Six times in 29 games, Marcus Freeman’s team has utterly shit the bed. We can live with an inconsistent Riley Leonard. We cannot live with an inconsistent Marcus Freeman.
Freeman’s great strength so far has been his response to the bed-shitting. That was always Kelly’s weakness. Once the spiral started, it accelerated, with the head coach routinely the first to point fingers. Freeman does not point fingers. Freeman wears it. And so far, Freeman’s team has always responded by pulling it together. For how frequently the bed has been shat, it has never been shat in consecutive games. Came real close one time against Cal! But we made it to the toilet that day.
If we were to predict the rest of this season based on these past results, we would predict Notre Dame makes it to the toilet against Purdue and Miami–Ohio, possibly even pulling it together enough to then beat underrated Louisville at the end of the month. It’s what comes next in that prediction that needs to stop happening. Because if history is our guide, what comes next is another bed-shitting against Stanford or Georgia Tech, and then one more later on in the year. That’s the pace: We’re shitting the bed in 20% of our games under Marcus Freeman. That’s what needs to stop.
Theoretically, this should be kind of easy. Freeman’s big challenges are preparing for his weakest opponents and getting the right number of defenders on the field for the two biggest plays this program has seen since January 2013. Those should be easier to fix than the fundamental issues which plagued Brian Kelly, Charlie Weis, Tyrone Willingham, George O’Leary, and Bob Davie, challenges which ranged from poor recruiting to fraud. Freeman needs to fix them, though. He needs to fix them. Will he? Last year, we said yes, and the proper statistical view of Freeman’s tenure is to see a 5–6 record in one-score games, see the game control measurements in those eleven, and forecast positive regression beyond his 20–9 overall mark. Given this exact loss just happened a third time in three years, though, you’d be forgiven for telling the stats to screw off. We still say yes. But man oh man, is the feeling bad around Notre Dame football today. I wonder how Texas A&M is feeling.
**
We’ll talk about Purdue on Friday. They’re going to be hungry, they’re going to see an opportunity, and their quarterback—Hudson Card—is good and tough.
We’ll also talk about women’s soccer on Friday. It’s going well, and we are appreciative that something is going well.
