If you take out Ole Miss, Texas, and Utah (the more "difficult opponents") and just compare QB stats this is what you get: Heaps: QB rating 118.2; TD 6; INT 4 Nelson: QB rating 173.6; TD 15; INT 5 I even removed Nelson's Idaho stats (which were excellent) since he only had 7 attempts, and Nelson (still) clearly played better. So for all those who say it was a discrepancy in schedules and that their performances against mediocrity were comparable - you're wrong.

Dana makes sense. steviecarlile steps past the difference between a game-day warrior and a practice-day technician. I agree that both Nelson and Heaps succeeded against practice-squad-level competition. The difference between the QB a quality D1 team would play and one they hope transfers -- preferably to a scheduled opponent -- is the difference between how one leads his team and the other wants the team to do the heavy lifting for him. One attacks the opponent, barks at them for breaking-up his plays, and wills his team to win. The other watches a pick-6 run by him and jumps OVER the ball he fumbles into the end zone (at least kick it out of the end zone as you run out the back of it yourself!) and after the game talks about how he "tried to make a heads-up play" even though his team collapsed in that game under his "leadership." I believe we could borrow here Danny White's recent words about Vontaze Burfict, "When your best football player is a guy like that, he's what I call a coach killer. He's such a great athlete, you have to have him on the field. But by the same token, the negatives outweigh the positives with him. As great a player as he is, you can' t have that. And then what happens, when if you don't take extreme measures with it, then it becomes a cancer on the team. And I started seeing other guys [...] starting to act like that and I think it became infectious. No matter how good a player is, when he's got that kind of attitude on the field, when he hurts you like Vontaze hurt the team, you got to get rid of him. As hard as that is, and it's a hard thing to do, especially when he's your best player, you just can't have it or it does become a cancer, and I think he did." http://www.azcentral.com/sports/asu/articles/2011/11/30/20111130asu-football-vontaze-burfict-danny-white.html?utm_source=bleacherreport.com&utm_medium=referral#ixzz1fIpQvXlX

Dana, To say that the schedule Heaps torched through last season was any different than the schedule that Nelson just blew through this year is asinine. In fact, I would make the argument that last season's schedule that Heaps faced was better than the schedule that Riley faced this year. Of course, we don't know how well Nelson would have done had he been named the starter at the beginning of 2011, especially when you consider BYU had a rookie OC (whose play calling was mediocre at best to begin the season), no running game to speak of, and an offensive line struggling to protect the QB. Nelson certainly deserves credit for his heroics at the end of the Utah State game...but nearly everyone unanimously admitted that had Utah State game planned for Riley they wouldn't have been taken so off guard. I credit circumstances more than anything in that situation. We do know, however, how Heaps looked against the same type of competition later in the year when he played against NMSU and Idaho. In my opinion, he looked every bit as good as Nelson had since becoming the starter. So please don't come on here making unsubstantiated claims about Heaps and how misguided we all were because of last season's schedule. One can easily argue that we're in the exact same boat with Nelson this season. Time will tell if sacrificing two more seasons with Heaps was worth one more season for an injury-prone Nelson. I'm betting not.