So Dayne Crist will wind up at Kansas. It only makes sense. He was walloped by a percussive tornado, endured a surreal and sometimes cartoonishly dodgy journey thereafter and, finally, in a snap found a peaceful home with familiar faces all around him.
This is the idea, anyway, for a quarterback who arrived at Notre Dame teeming with promise and left it, football-wise, in a fog. So Crist decided Thursday to join new Jayhawks coach Charlie Weis, the man who recruited him to the Irish. And he will try to concoct a happier ending.
“I knew pretty early in the season that I wasn’t going to have another opportunity at Notre Dame, and that was clear,” Crist told the Tribune. “From there, it was just about figuring out how I could continue to play the game that I love.
“I won’t lie, it was easily the hardest time in my life. Really, the only light at the end of the tunnel was knowing I had another year and one more possibility to play.”
Crist graduated from Notre Dame this month, 31/2 years after arrival. Thanks to the NCAA’s post-graduate transfer rules, he can play immediately at Kansas. He will be on campus for a Jan. 15 team meeting … but not before he spends Jan. 1-3 at events for the 2011 Allstate AFCA Good Works Team.
More Top Picks Sneaker
Crist was 4-6 as a starter at Notre Dame. By the end of 2011, neither side was totally blameless in whatever rift existed between a dejected Crist and Irish coach Brian Kelly.
And a week before his transfer request went public, Crist volunteered at Hope Ministries in South Bend, helping prepare Thanksgiving meals. Do you believe good things should happen to good people?
“Words cannot describe what Dayne meant to this team, what he meant to me,” Irish quarterback Andrew Hendrix said earlier this month. “Every time I needed something, I looked over to him and he would help me out. It probably got really annoying for him, actually.
“But he showed me how to be a leader, how to handle things. Dayne’s just the ideal quarterback and the ideal person.”
Or as safety Harrison Smith put it: “You’re never going to meet a better guy than Dayne.”
Crist wasn’t going to find a better situation, either.
Weis will hold him aloft as a model college athlete and give him almost unconditional trust. Barring injury, Crist gets 12 starts in 2012 in an offense he knows intimately to show the pro scouts. The fact Kansas ranked 106th in total offense last year? Incidental.
“Being able to feel comfortable with the system walking in, just having a great feel when I was on campus and with the other guys on the team, the opportunities that lie there — it all felt right to me and felt like a situation where we could be real positive and successful,” Crist said.
He could use positive vibes after an injury-shortened 2009 and 2010 and a coach-shortened 2011. Asked to explain his halftime benching in the ’11 opener, to explain why things happened the way they happened this year, Crist sighed and said: “I wish I could, but it just kind of happened, and I was as confused as anyone.”
So, he said, you bloom where you’re planted. He’s bound for the Plains and he’s going to play, which is all he can ask for. The former five-star recruit rejoins his mentor to try to match his potential. Based on the Twitter feeds of Notre Dame players Thursday, Kansas football has some new fans pulling for that.
“I’m not about proving anything to anybody,” Crist said. “I’m just going to be the same guy I’ve been for four years, the same guy that just loves playing football and loves being with his teammates. That’s the most important thing to me.”
Twitter @ChiTribHamilton