The rumblings that Notre Dame football’s next transfer portal quarterback addition could be one the Irish played against in 2023 started well before Duke junior quarterback Riley Leonard entered the portal Wednesday.
But they will only grow louder now with Leonard reportedly having a “do not contact” tag connected to his portal entry. That has often been associated with a portal player who already has a good idea of where he wants to go and doesn’t want the deluge of an open market coming his way.
The process should be familiar for Notre Dame after pulling Wake Forest quarterback Sam Hartman out of the portal last offseason. The first report of Hartman’s eventual Notre Dame decision surfaced before he even played in his team’s bowl game last December.
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Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman acknowledged Monday the need to be ready to make a move on a portal quarterback before they’ve entered.
“You’re always evaluating the top quarterbacks in the country,” Freeman said. “If you wait until every quarterback enters the portal to say, ‘OK, let’s evaluate him,’ it’s going to be too late. The timeframe of when a young man enters the portal to when they decide what school they’re going to, every second counts and every second matters.
“We’ve evaluated a lot of quarterbacks. We’ve evaluated a lot of different positions that could possibly enter the portal that we know would have another year. As those guys enter the portal, we have to be able to make a decision right away, is this somebody that we feel fits our program?
“That’s in terms of athletic ability. The other side of that is going to be is their personality fit what we want here at Notre Dame. That’s what’s going to X a lot of guys off the list as you continue to talk to them and do research on each individual. We have to make sure we bring in the right guys to our football program, too.”
Notre Dame should have a pretty good sense for Leonard after beating him at Duke, 21-14, on Sept. 30. Leonard finished the game 12-of-27 passing (44.4%) for 134 yards with one touchdown and one interception. He also rushed 18 times for 88 yards.
Leonard suffered a high ankle sprain on Duke’s final offensive play of the game when ND nose tackle Howard Cross III sacked and stripped him. Hartman waited for Leonard to leave the injury tent after the game to speak to him briefly.
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That injury forced Leonard to miss one game. He played through the pain against Florida State and Louisville before suffering a toe injury that sidelined him for the rest of the season.
In seven games in 2023, Leonard completed 95 of his 165 passes (57.6%) for 1,102 yards with three touchdowns and three interceptions. He rushed for 352 yards and four touchdowns on 58 carries.
Leonard became the full-time starter at Duke ahead of the 2022 season. He impressed with 2,967 passing yards and 20 passing touchdowns on 250-of-392 attempts (63.8%) with six interceptions. He also turned 124 carries into 699 yards and 13 touchdowns.
Leonard, 21, signed with Duke as a three-star recruit out of Fairhope (Ala.) High. Rivals ranked him as the No. 15 dual-threat quarterback in the 2021 class.
Leonard isn’t an early graduate at Duke, so the academic conditions of a transfer to Notre Dame won’t be easy to navigate. But the Irish accepted an undergraduate transfer from Northwestern safety Brandon Joseph following his 2021 junior season, so there is precedence for a similar transfer for the football program. Leonard has one season of college eligibility remaining.
Head coach Mike Elko left Duke this week to take over the Texas A&M program. But Notre Dame and Auburn are considered more likely destinations for Leonard rather than Texas A&M.
In a farewell to Duke, which Leonard shared on Instagram, he expressed how fishing on Duke’s campus made him feel at home. Oddly enough, Hartman is a big fisherman himself and quickly identified spots to fish around Notre Dame’s campus last spring.
Perhaps Hartman can help Notre Dame reel Leonard in as its next star quarterback.
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