When it was announced that Dayne Crist would follow Charlie Weis to Kansas, there was some cause for optimism that the Notre Dame transfer would, if nothing else, bring stability to the quarterback position and allow the offense to not shoot itself in the foot.

Whoops.

I have to think Crist will get better, because how can he not, but if we can take four games as any type of sample it is pretty clear that he is not the quarterback he was hyped up to be. (I understand he lost his job at Notre Dame for a reason, but the current version of Crist is basically a guy Kansas would not recruit. That's bad and I think worse than any Kansas fan expected).

But just how bad has he been? I've taken some time and done a breakdown showing how Crist has done vs. how our opponents OTHER opposing quarterbacks have done, both in table and graph form. While I could have used a bunch of different metrics, I settled on completion percentage and yards per attempt, because I think that is a nice mix of steady/safe and explosiveness. I also only used Rice, TCU and NIU because it does not make a lot of sense to compare him to the other opponents of an FCS team.

Rice

Other Opponents:

UCLA

at Louisiana Tech

Marshall

Now a look in handy graph form:

It was posted in the comments of an earlier post (although for the life of me I cannot find it) that Crist was much worse against Rice than his counterparts, but this is confirmation of just how bad it was.

TCU

Other opponents:

vs. Grambling

vs. Virginia

Crist had his best game of the year against TCU, throwing for over 300 yards, but it should be noted that the relative domination he shows here is mostly due to half of TCU's other games coming against FCS competition.

NIU

other opponents:

Iowa

Tennessee-Martin

at Army

Graph:

Interestingly Army threw just 4 times in their game, for a whopping 2 YPA (though I only took QB attempts which ended up at 3), and yet Crist was so bad, especially completion percentage wise, that it did not matter even one bit.

So oddly enough it was against the best defense Kansas has faced this year in which Crist has done the best, which I think correlates well with the eye test. However, given that that defense has not been tested by its other opponents, Crist's performance is a bit of fool's gold and he has a long way to go before he is even a respectable Big 12 quarterback, and thus we have a long way to go before we are even a respectable Big 12 team.