Hutton: Crist benching will haunt Kelly

• Reprints

Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly in the second quarter of an NCAA college football game in Stanford, Calif., Saturday, Nov. 26, 2011. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)

Updated: January 1, 2012 8:18AM

I expect him to be the starter for 13 weeks. I have great confidence in his leadership ability.”

“Quite honestly, he’s the kind of guy I want to coach. He’s tougher mentally and he handles the leadership position the way I want it handled.”

“He showed great escapability. We have to have someone who can extend plays.”

That was Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly talking on Aug. 23 about Dayne Crist after he selected him as the starting quarterback.

We haven’t heard from Crist since the week before the South Florida game. His 13-week vote of confidence lasted for one awful, terrible half before he was pulled, effectively ending his career at Notre Dame. It turned out to be a brutishly cold move, given the praise Kelly had just lathered on Crist. It also turned out to be the wrong decision. Easy to say in hindsight, but Kelly gets paid an enormous amount of money to make the right call in those difficult situations. It’s entirely possible, depending on how Andrew Hendrix progresses, that Kelly hindered the development of the quarterback position for another year by giving up on Crist.

How so? Crist likely won’t return for a fifth year and I don’t see how Rees can be the guy going forward after he was pulled from the Stanford game after one half. Hendrix, who looks promising and who seems to have the traits Kelly wants in a quarterback, will have an enormous amount of pressure on him and not much game experience under his belt. Kelly has established that he’s short-tempered and impatient with quarterbacks. He also likely reduced his options for experienced quarterbacks to run his offense by one in 2012 by the way he handled Crist’s demotion.

Anyone who watched Rees and the Notre Dame offensive line crater under the pressure from Stanford’s defense and who was remotely familiar with Rees couldn’t be all that surprised with his first-half performance. Rees was 6-of-13 for 60 yards passing with one interception and two sacks.

Rees’ weaknesses — his inability to run the football and to consistently run the offense at the warp speed that Kelly wanted him — caught up with him. Rees was good enough to beat Purdue, Maryland, Wake Forest, Michigan State and Pittsburgh but not good enough to get it done against Stanford and USC, two legitimate top-10 teams. Rees has a remote chance against the good teams if the defense and running games are great and if he doesn’t make mistakes. None of that was working for him against the Cardinal. Jonas Gray was hurt and the defense, while it played admirably, was banged up.

What the season showed is why Kelly was so hesitant to name Rees the starter in the first place: His ceiling was pretty low. Rees can manage the game but he doesn’t elevate the offense in a spectacular way. Kelly was defensive the week before when a simple question about evaluating the play of Rees after a 16-14 win over Boston College was asked. His one-sentence response: He’s 12-2 as a starter.

The Irish could’ve finished with a four-loss season with Crist back there, too. However, ND could’ve had a more settled quarterback situation for next year with Crist as an option. There is no reason to believe that Crist, over time, couldn’t have been as good or better than Rees was this year. He was never in danger of losing his job as the starter before he was hurt against Tulsa and he did have the escapability factor, along with the better arm, that Rees didn’t have.

Over time, Kelly has asked for trust, deferring to his 21 years of experience as a coach, to create a stable program. He has talked about building the program up behind the scenes.

It’s those mistakes — the in-season revolt by his players after he was critical of them publicly and the over-the-top praise of Crist and then his demotion — that make blind faith (the kind Kelly asks for) foolish. It’s only going to get tougher next year, when the Irish have to play Oklahoma and USC on the road and Miami at Solider Field with Hendrix beginning the year with, at most, one game under his belt as a starter.