For a little while Saturday, it looked like Stanford was hitting all the checkpoints for an annoyingly stupid Notre Dame game against a lesser opponent that went down to the wire.

Not this time, though.

Notre Dame exploded for 49 straight points after an opening Cardinal touchdown drive and cruised to the 49-7 win in what was easily the most complete game it has played this season. All facets of the game were effective – if not always beautiful – for the Irish.

The best thing I can say about this one is it was the first game this season that felt like the 2023 season, when Notre Dame had little trouble with any of the weaker teams.

This is the Riley Leonard we were sold

Riley Leonard was not perfect Saturday. He missed a couple of pretty easy throws and was quite late on some others. However, he showed the entire repertoire and looked, for the first time, like the true dual threat Irish fans were promised when he transferred from Duke.

His 3rd and 7 scramble out of trouble for 18 yards and a first down on ND’s go-ahead drive in the second quarter was probably the most important play of the game, and it snapped the Irish offense completely into form. From there it was Leonard for 5, Leonard for 7, a 4-yard Leonard completion and an absolute dart from Leonard to Jayden Thomas for the score.

He wasn’t perfect, but he made several impressive throws – his other short-range TD toss, to Kris Mitchell, was just as pretty as the first – and was his usual effective self in the running game. Yes, it was Stanford, but it’s not like world-beating defenses were making Leonard look bad earlier this season. For maybe the first time, Leonard looked like a quarterback that could get the Irish to the Playoff.

I’ll try to not be negative and wonder if Leonard would have looked more like this all along if he hadn’t been out for all of spring practice recovering from another ankle surgery. I’ll try.

Defensive depth

Marcus Freeman hasn’t been quite the game-changing recruiter Notre Dame fans hoped for. The five-stars aren’t lining up to attend ND. (I’m not breaking any news here.) However, Freeman and the staff have unmistakably upgraded the depth of this team, and you need look no further than the defensive line today for Exhibit A.

Imagine, for instance, the 2020 team without its two top rush ends (to say nothing of the fact that Boubacar Traore, the second of those two, was a tremendous find by this staff that I can’t promise the previous one would’ve uncovered). Or the 2018 team. Or any recent contending Notre Dame team. This one lost Jordan Botelho and Traore and simply plugged in Josh Burnham and Bryce Young and got great results in their own right.

Burnham had that terrific sniff-out of the speed option that resulted in a pseudo-interception:

Bryce made his presence felt a few different times and continued to look like a guy that should be getting most of RJ Oben’s snaps. Even digging deep into the defensive depth chart did not fail to make Notre Dame look like a team with an overwhelming talent advantage – which they should pretty much always look like against Stanford.

RTDB

It’s not news to anyone that Riley Leonard makes it all the harder to defend the Notre Dame running game, and Jeremiyah Love and Jadarian Price took full advantage Saturday. The two backs took all the non-Leonard carries in the first 3 quarters, and each scored a touchdown. Love had but seven touches (I am still on the “he should have 20 touches in any competitive game” train, but since this one wasn’t competitive, I’ll allow it) and turned them into 78 yards. Price only averaged four yards a carry – it was a bit of an eyebrow-raiser that he got so much more early work than Love – but he too hit pay dirt with a pretty run.

Credit, too, to the offensive line, which on the whole looked very good in both the run and the pass today. Again, Stanford, but the bye week seems to have done some favors to a lot of parts of this Notre Dame team.

If this Irish team is to make any kind of run for the postseason, it will have to come on the backs of its running game, so to see this much success today was heartening.

The big picture

We’re at the halfway point, and it’s safe to say very little about this season makes any sense. However, ND boasts a top-15 win that will only continue to gain steam – there’s a pretty decent chance Texas A&M gets to its matchup against Texas with a 10-1 record – and a half-season that provides several tests against currently unbeaten Army and Navy, a decent Georgia Tech team, and a who-the-heck-knows game at USC at the end. In fact, much about the remaining weeks remind me of 2021, when a good but not great ND team got its crap together after a much-needed bye week and made itself a factor in the four-team playoff race.

The road map is in place for the Irish. Can they find the way?