There’s a reason we have already looked at five potential replacements for Billy Napier at Florida. Poor decision-making has riddled his tenure in Gainesville, Fla. However, in Week 4, a potentially questionable decision was averted when Mississippi State’s own ineptness on defense bailed him out.
Florida Lucked Out With Mississippi State’s Inept Defense
According to the broadcast, the Gators were set to start QB Graham Mertz, with five-star true freshman DJ Lagway playing the third, sixth, and ninth possessions under center.
What?
Yes, the final result looks in favor of the Gators, and it looked like the Florida offense played a terrific game. But it was far from the quarterback play that pushed the result in favor of the Gators.
Mertz finished with a respectable 191 yards and 3 touchdowns, completing all but two pass attempts. But the throwing lanes were open, yards were carved out after the catch, and only a handful of times did Mertz actually push the ball into a window of tight coverage or, to put it plainly, good coverage.
He did what you should do when you are a starting quarterback throwing against air.
True to the decision, Napier subbed in Lagway on multiple occasions, including a mid-drive substitution that pulled Mertz, the hot hand, for a designed QB run.
This was Lagway’s first entrance into a game with Mertz that wasn’t due to injury, after he was first injected into the line when Mertz suffered a concussion in the Gators’ season-opening loss to Miami.
Lagway started Florida’s Week 2 game against Samford, and most saw starting Lagway for the rest of the season as Napier’s only way to remain Florida’s head coach into 2025.
However, he didn’t believe so, opting to start a healthy Mertz against Texas A&M in Week 3, which was likely the nail in the coffin.
Napier and the Gators entered the locker room down 20-0 at halftime to roaring boos from the crowd. The sound swelled once more when a public service announcement of Napier speaking about NIL was shown on the big screen. But it got worse.
Trailing 26-7 midway through the third quarter, Mertz needed to produce a scoring drive — in a way, he did. On 3rd-and-9, he forced a throw, resulting in a 45-yard pick-six and his benching in favor of Lagway.
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What did the freshman do on the next possession? Lead the Gators on a 10-play, 72-yard TD drive.
Now, with the Mississippi State game in hand, and both quarterbacks performing well against a less-than-poor defense, the decisions only get tougher for Napier as the season gets more difficult in the month of October.
Is Lagway the better player right now? Probably not, but he is the future of the program, and that’s all fans want to see in what appears to be another lost season.
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