Want to win a national title as a QB in 2025? Start small, but think big
Notre Dame and Ohio State will play for the national championship on Monday. And both used the transfer portal to find their starting quarterbacks.
ATLANTA — Four years ago, as Riley Leonard entered his senior season of high school football in Fairhope, Ala., he received such little recruiting interest that the deeply religious 6-foot-4 quarterback began to consult a higher power in his search for a college scholarship.
“I remember sitting in my room and praying at night like, 'Jesus, Lord, would you please just give me something, give me an offer?” Leonard said.
Duke University eventually answered that prayer and a few years later, Leonard attended a famed summertime academy for quarterbacks in Louisiana run by Archie Manning, the former NFL quarterback and father of Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks Peyton and Eli. At the academy, Leonard roomed with Will Howard, the starting quarterback at Kansas State who, like Leonard, shared a similar backstory. Each was a three-star high school prospect out of a possible five who, passed over by the country’s most tradition-rich schools, had instead proved himself as a starter at a middle-tier program.
At the camp, Leonard and Howard stayed up late talking.
“Life, and who we are as people and families and our goals in the future and things like that,” Leonard recalled. “So it was just a genuine conversation. We were both kind of underdogs at the time.”
Rating: 5