(defining heavy usage as 100+ attempts)

• 2000, with Charlie Peterson. BYU finished 6-6
• 2002, with Matt Berry. BYU finished 5-7
• 2003, with Matt Berry. BYU finished 4-8
• 2011, with Riley Nelson. BYU finished 10-3
• 2012, with Riley Nelson. BYU finished 8-5
• 2014, with Christian Stewart. BYU finished 8-5 (after a 4-0 start with Taysom so 4-5 with Stewart)
• 2017, with Joe Critchlow. BYU finished 4-9
• 2023, with Jake Retzlaff. BYU finished 5-7

It's not impossible to win with a QB that wasn't highly rated. Riley Nelson proved that exceptions exist (and so has Conover, albeit in the opposite direction)

But unless we had Riley Nelson, we finished .500 or worse any time we had to rely on any other QB playing that wasn't highly rated in coming to us

Compare that to the seasons we did have a Top 1000 ranked QB recruit taking snaps and we were almost always excellent (except for 2004, when we went 5-6 with John Beck as a sophomore)

Like I said, not a perfect correlation and exceptions exist ...but we're a passing QB focused school and we pretty much need a good QB to do well