From what I heard listening to Driskell, he's saying he has played much better against bad teams while at Duke than he did on Saturday against NIU with ND. That is a fact. His take was that if all your saying needs to be done to fix the offense is replace Leonard, then you're taking the easy road of analysis. There were problems other than Leonard, and they are problems that aren't going to be fixed by swapping in another QB. He also wonders why Duke can get a much better version of Leonard and he comes here and looks even worse against the bad competition as well. I try to listen to multiple analysts in order to get more information, but all of them had the same overall opinion of Leonard, he's a gamer who wants to win, can use his legs to hurt the opponent, and has made throws when needed to either win games or stay competitive against tough competition. We saw that against A&M, I don't think ND would have won that game without him. NIU looked like, other than the first drive, they tried to make him play like something he wasn't, and he struggled.
To play devil's advocate, the offense looks a hot mess, but this is the 3rd OC in 3 years, and when that happened to the defense prior to Golden, they had some big issues his first year here as well, especially red zone defense. Things looked much better in year two, all the way up until yesterday where they looked lost, and our players who looked fast and confident against A&M looked slow and confused against NIU. I'm not sure I can put that 100% on the coaching staff. The offense can still continue to get better, Leonard can get better, the OL can get better as well. Perhaps things will look much better in year two with Denbrock as well. I am sure people will say it is because Leonard is no longer the QB and forget that everyone finally is in their second year in a system, the QBs included.
All in all, I think they need to run the damn ball with Love and Price, and almost any throw that Leonard makes needs to be an RPO or play action. Scrap all the drop back shit completely, it is not who he is and does not play into the strengths of your team. Yes, Love and Price are going to get stuffed sometimes because the line is young and makes mistakes, but when they get it right those two are going to make big yards and TDs as they have already shown this year.