It’s not a mirage to see that Riley Leonard’s passing game is on the upswing. The Notre Dame quarterback turned in his best passing performance of the season in last week’s 31-24 win over Louisville when he completed just a shade under 74% of his 23 pass attempts and threw two touchdown passes.

When Riley Leonard transferred from Duke to Notre Dame, things did not go as planned. In a bit of ultimate Notre Dame irony, Leonard ended up missing almost all of Spring ball due to medical work being done to care for an injury the Irish created in 2023.

The Athletic’s Pete Sampson grabbed the quote from the “injured” one, and it wasn’t exactly that. Leonard told the press that he just got the wind knocked out of him, and needed a play to regroup. He said that “it was really no problem after a couple minutes. It really didn’t play an impact on me.”