Notre Dame football announces 2025 Echoes Award winners, including MVP

Notre Dame announced its annual Echoes Award winners Friday night. Here is the full list of them with some notes from Blue & Gold.

2025 Notre Dame football Echoes Award winners

• Most Valuable Player: Junior running back Jeremiyah Love
• Man of the Year: Redshirt junior offensive lineman Aamil Wagner
• Defensive Players of the Year: Junior linebacker Drayk Bowen and redshirt sophomore safety Adon Shuler
• Offensive Player of the Year: Redshirt freshman quarterback CJ Carr
• Special Teams Player of the Year: Redshirt junior running back Jadarian Price
• Scholar-Athlete Award: Senior linebacker Jerry Rullo
• Iron Cross Award: Senior tight end Eli Raridon
• Walk-On of the Year: Kobi Onyiuke
• Offensive Scout Team Player of the Year: Senior wide receiver Leo Scheidler
• Defensive Scout Team Player of the Year: Freshman linebacker Ko’o Kia

Blue & Gold notes

• Love is a Heisman Trophy candidate, a Doak Walker Award candidate and a candidate for the Walter Camp Player of the Year award. He was the easy and obvious choice to be named Notre Dame’s MVP.

• Wagner is a team captain and the only Notre Dame player to start all 28 games in each of the last two seasons. He’s as standup as they come.

• Perhaps a little bit of a surprise Leonard Moore was not named Notre Dame’s defensive MVP, but if anyone else is going to share that honor it might as well be team captains Bowen and Shuler.

• The next most valuable player on the entire team, let alone the Notre Dame offense, might be Carr. So it’s no wonder he earned the offensive MVP nod with Love getting the overall MVP distinction.

• Price leads the country in yards per kick return if he had enough to register for the top of the list, and he’s one of a handful of players in the nation with two kick return touchdowns this season.

• Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman has gone out of his way to shout out Rullo in press conferences before, so he must be doing something right. Clearly, he is.

• Raridon is a horse of all horses from a physical standpoint, so him getting his due is status quo. The Iron Cross Award is a weight room driven accolade.

• Onyiuke is always one of the first walk-ons to get playing time at the end of blowouts. He’s a Notre Dame special teams staple from start to finish.

• Both ends of the walk-on spectrum filled with Scheidler and Kia earning their respective honors. Kia started getting some special teams run at the end of the season, and Scheidler got himself a couple of catches vs. Syracuse.