Leidner deserves all the credit he is getting for way he played against Nebraska.
Still he is wildly inconsistent and remains a bottom half of the conference talent level QB.
Inconsistent- absolutely, as I would expect for a Sophomore QB. I'm not disagreeing that Mich can take you through an entire array of emotions during a game but the bottom half of the conference in talent? I'd love to know what metric you're using to support that remark. Lets look at commonly used metrics for QB performance of all the Big 10 QBs in conference games (who have played any significant amount of time in conference games) to date.
School QB Year TD/INT Comp% YPA QBRate Rush Yds
Illinois Lunt Soph 3/0 60.5% 6.07 123.7 -36
Illinois O'Toole Snr 6/6 57.5% 6.37 116.8 102
Indiana Sudfeld Jnr 1/2 39.1% 4.59 126.6 16
Indiana Diamont Fresh 1/4 40.7% 3.67 71.8 99
Iowa Rudick Jnr 9/2 62.2% 8.00 144.4 60
Maryland Brown Snr 11/9 51.1% 5.55 100.1 218
Michigan Gardner Snr 3/8 58.5% 6.09 105.8 169
Mich St Cook Jnr 12/3 55.0% 8.56 142.2 61
Minnesota Leidner Soph 8/4 52.2% 8.08 133.9 356
Nebraska Armstrong Soph 6/7 50.9% 7.09 130.7 279
NWestern Siemian Snr 4/6 56.8% 5.62 104.6 -121
Ohio State Barrett Fresh 20/5 65.6% 8.59 168.3 644
Penn State Hackenberg Soph 4/8 53.3% 5.24 96.2 -98
Purdue Appleby Soph 9/8 53.6% 5.67 107.5 150
Rutgers Nova Snr 6/10 51.1% 7.15 111.0 -28
Wisconsin Stave Jnr 6/4 57.6% 7.01 126.5 -16
Wisconsin McEvoy Jnr 0/2 53.8% 4.00 72.1 284
By my assessment of the data there are 17 QBs who have played significant time in Big 10 games. Of those 17 QBs Mitch is 5th in TD:Int ratio, 3rd in YPA, 4th in QB rating and 2nd in Rushing yards.
The only metric that he is within the bottom half of QBs is Completion % in which he ranks 12th of the 17. While this metric seems very important to some, I would argue that in our offense it is of lesser importance. My reasoning being that, no mater who our QB is, he's unlikely to throw the ball more than 20 times a game (unless we're getting rolled and it's the 4th quarter). Thus, a QB completing ~57% of his passes, Siemian for instance (who many folks seem to have a man crush on), would complete 1-2 more passes than Mitch; however, would throw for 50 less yards. In addition, since he and many other of these QBs, are "dink and dunkers" they would fail to get the opponents secondary to respect the deep throw- which Mitch will eventually achieve if he as able to keep his YPA up.
Anyway, while Mitch can be exasperating at times, no mater how one looks at the data- I don't buy he's in the lower half of the Big10.
