Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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BLUEGOLDONLINE.COM MARCH 2025 29 back. Could any other signal-caller on the Notre Dame roster have gotten the Irish there within the confines of the current construct of the roster? We'll never know. But Leonard did. T1. Safety Xavier Watts The graduate student safety is the best player on the better side of the ball for Notre Dame. But it's more than that with Watts. A year after intercepting 7 passes in 13 games, he held relatively steady and intercepted 6 in Notre Dame's 16 games. His 82 total tackles ranked sec- ond on the Notre Dame roster, behind only graduate student linebacker Jack Kiser's 90. Watts, though, led the team in overall defensive Pro Football Focus grade. His mark of 89.7 edged freshman corner Leonard Moore's figure of 89.1. Watts can cover man-to-man. He can come downhill and fill in rushing lanes. He can help over the top. He can do it all. He's the Notre Dame defense's en- gine, quite frankly. He makes it go. 3. Running Back Jeremiyah Love It's quite remarkable someone who averaged only 11.9 touches per game can even be in this conversation. Love is just that special. It took until the 14th game of the year against Georgia in the Sugar Bowl for Love not to score a rushing touchdown for the first time this season. He had 17 of those plus 2 through the air to go along with 163 carries for 1,125 rushing yards and 28 catches for 237 receiving yards — all with the ninth-best bro- ken plus missed tackles per attempt rate (30.9 percent) of any ball carrier in col- lege football, per Sports Info Solutions. As for the number of hurdles? Enough to leave you in utter astonishment. MOST IMPROVED 1. Safety Adon Shuler When the Irish brought in North- western graduate transfer safety Rod Heard II, they probably expected him to start alongside Watts. Someone forgot to tell Shuler, though. After redshirting his freshman year, Shuler bulked up. He went from a thin newcomer to crop-topped terror on the back end. His skill set proved to be a perfect complement to Watts, and it be- came clear before long that nothing was keeping him from the lineup. Shuler finished the season with 59 tackles and 3 interceptions, including a pick six. His best game came in the Sugar Bowl against Georgia, when he racked up 4 defensive stops (tackles that result in a failure for the offense) and forced a critical turnover. On third- and-short in Notre Dame's red zone, Shuler raced into the backfield and put his hat on the football to force a fumble by Bulldogs running back Trevor Eti- enne and take points off the board. 2. Running Back Jeremiyah Love Ahead of the 2023 season, Watts was the guy everyone at the Guglielmino Athletics Complex was talking about as a breakout star. A year later, the Notre Dame player generating that same kind of buzz was Love. As it turns out, the voices in the Gug might know a thing or two. Like Shuler, Love worked with strength coach Loren Landow to gain approxi- mately 20 pounds of muscle between the 2023 Sun Bowl and 2024 fall camp. That offseason essentially turned Love into The Terminator. He became an unstop- pable force in the backfield, producing highlights such as a 98-yard scamper in the CFP first round against Indiana and a 2-yard touchdown in the Orange Bowl against Penn State in which he broke four to five tackles on that play alone. Notre Dame prefers a shared back- field, so Love will likely never carry the ball enough to win the Heisman Trophy. But he's become one of the best players in the country. T3. Right Tackle Aamil Wagner and Linebacker Drayk Bowen Wagner couldn't beat out graduate student Tosh Baker for the starting right tackle job in the Sun Bowl. By the end of spring practice, though, the former was "consistently and noticeably" (of- fensive line coach Joe Rudolph's words) better than the latter. And he stabilized a position that was a major question mark entering the 2024 season. Bowen, after spending 2023 as a spe- cial teamer, took over the Mike line- backer position for JD Bertrand and exceeded all expectations. He comple- mented an athletic group of backers by being an old-school thumper in the middle of Notre Dame's defense, finish- ing the 2024 season with 78 tackles and 27 defensive stops. TOP SURPRISES 1. Cornerback Leonard Moore Moore took a page out of the Benja- min Morrison playbook. In 2022, you had to scroll a bit on On3's Notre Dame commit list page to find Morrison in the hierarchy of Fight- ing Irish signees from that class. He was closer to the bottom than the top in the rankings. And there he was, playing meaningful snaps in the season opener at Ohio State on his way to a 6-inter- ception, All-America season. Moore was buried in the 2024 rank- ings, and, sure enough, he turned him- self into a Freshman All-American, too. At some point, for as long as Mike Mickens is the defensive backs coach in South Bend, we need to stop being so surprised by these corners' rapid ascent. 2. Left Tackle Anthonie Knapp Notre Dame went from Charles Jag- usah to Tosh Baker to Knapp as the pro- jected left tackle starter for the season opener, all in the span of about a week. With such tumult pervading fall camp, anyone in their right mind foresaw chaos seeping into the regular season at that position. Nope. Knapp, just a true freshman, stabi- lized the situation and started every single game en route to the national championship game. Injuries and posi- tion swaps were aplenty all around him along the Notre Dame offensive line, but he stayed steady and held his own. Quite a pleasant surprise. 3. Center Pat Coogan Normally, when you start every game of one season and get benched before the season opener of the next, there re- ally isn't a path to playing time in your future. The transfer portal, in this era, beckons, and even if there is an injury that opens up an avenue, a player in Coogan's situation has already opted for the other door. Coogan isn't like those other players. He stayed at Notre Dame, got back onto the field because of Ashton Craig's season-ending injury and once again