...with some brutal sacks early in the 2011 season, and his psyche never recovered.

He started hurrying and rushing most of his throws, he started throwing the ball away too often and too early, and he started to suffer from having "happy feet" in the pocket.

In other words, he went from standing tall and playing with confidence in 2010 to being gun shy and extremely nervous to take a hit in 2011.

He never really recovered after that. He probably still has nightmares about some of the hits he took early in the 2011 season. He took some real head snapping slobberknockers.

I suspect that indirectly related to this was the fact that Matt Reynolds was nails at LT for Heaps in 2010, but he struggled to recover from shoulder surgery in 2011, and that might have been part of the reason that Heaps got absolutely abused by opposing DLs in 2011. It's also a reason why Matt Reynolds slipped down the NFL draft projections in 2011 and ultimately ended up going undrafted, despite being projected to be drafted pretty high earlier in his career at BYU.