As spring creeps toward summer and Year 4 of the Billy Napier era at the University of Florida edges ever closer, it’s worth thinking about how Napier defied the odds just getting here.
Napier was nearly dismissed, his fate all but certain after a tumultuous first month of the 2024 season that saw the Gators routed twice on their home field by Miami and Texas A&M.
A season-ending injury to senior quarterback Graham Mertz in an overtime loss at Tennessee only escalated tensions, with the Gators dropping to 1-7 in rivalry contests under Napier following the defeat and facing the prospect of playing their final 6 games without their starting quarterback. With the Gators sitting at 3-3 and games against several ranked opponents remaining, Florida’s bowl hopes — and Napier’s future in Gainesville — seemed bleak.
That’s when DJ Lagway entered the chat.
The 2024 Florida plan with Lagway, the big armed Texan who was a 5-star recruit and the Gatorade National Player of the Year out of high school, had always been for him to play consistently, but in a defined backup role, behind Mertz.
Mertz’s season-ending injury against Tennessee changed everything.
Yes, Lagway shined in a spot start against Samford in Week 2, setting Florida freshman passing records for yards and touchdowns in a game after Mertz suffered a concussion late in the loss to Miami. But it was one thing to play brilliantly against an overmatched foe from the FCS, and quite another to be QB1 against one of the toughest October and November schedules in college football.
You already know the rest of the story.
Lagway went 6-0 in games he started and finished, earning Consensus Freshman All-American honors and powering the Gators to wins over a top-10 Ole Miss team, rivals LSU and FSU, and a 33-8 Gasparilla Bowl rout of Tulane in the process. The only game Lagway started and lost came against archrival Georgia, and the Gators appeared in control of that game before Lagway exited with an injury in the second quarter.
On the way, Lagway threw for 1,915 yards passing and 12 touchdowns, ranking 2nd in the SEC yards per attempt (10) and second in average depth of target (11.8) behind only Jaxson Dart of Ole Miss (10 yards per attempt, average depth of target 11.9), who was drafted in the first round of the NFL Draft last week.
Among SEC starters returning in 2025, Lagway’s big-time throw percentage of 8.8% is nearly 3% higher than any other returning starter (Diego Pavia is 2nd, at 5.9%).
Put plainly, Lagway provides Napier the type of transcendental talent necessary to elevate the entire program. Can the embattled head coach cash in?
The noise around the program is mixed.
Lagway didn’t throw in the spring, recovering from a complicated shoulder injury that doctors typically try to treat with rest, rather than surgery.
Florida fans spent the spring glued to basketball but woke up from the Gators Boys championship fever dream wondering if Lagway would be okay come the autumn. You could almost hear the gasps of relief from Gator Nation audibly when clips of Lagway throwing missiles popped up on Instagram last week.
Lagway’s potential, a stable of playmakers offensively, coupled with key returnees on both lines of scrimmage, including All-American center Jake Slaughter and likely preseason All-American defensive tackle Caleb Banks, have elevated the Gators to the top 10 in some preseason rankings. Other analysts are less convinced, largely due to concerns over Napier, who is an uninspiring 19-19 in 3 seasons at Florida entering a pivotal fourth year.
The odds aren’t as stacked against Napier as it may seem.
Since the Alliance Bowl started the trend to unite the sport around one national champion in 1995, 9 different head coaches have won their first national championship in Year 4 or beyond, including Nick Saban at LSU (Year 4), Kirby Smart at Georgia (Year 6), and Florida’s favorite son, Steve Spurrier (Year 7). In each of those instances, though, there were signs that championships were simply a matter of time. Saban won the SEC at LSU in Year 2, winning 26 games in his first 3 seasons on campus.
Smart won the SEC in Year 2 as well and played for the SEC Championship on 2 other occasions, losing to Saban’s Alabama juggernaut and a future national champion in LSU in those contests. And Spurrier? All he did before capturing Florida’s first claimed national championship was revolutionize the SEC, winning 5 conference titles in his first 6 seasons in Gainesville before breaking through in 1996.
In fact, of the 9 coaches who won in Year 4 or later, only 2 “Napier-like” pathways stand out.
The first is Dabo Swinney’s march to national championship No. 1, which he managed in his 8th full season at the helm in Tigertown. Swinney built Clemson slowly and methodically, with a flurry of strong recruiting classes and talent evaluations and modest year-to-year improvements until an elite quarterback talent, Deshaun Watson, helped the Tigers break through in 2016.
The problem with this comparison is two-fold. First, Swinney built Clemson from the ground up in the pre-portal era ACC, a far weaker conference than the SEC, with only one premier program (Florida State) in the way at the time Swinney’s Tigers were ascending.
Second, Swinney still showed flashes of being competitive early, winning 2 conference titles prior to the national championship season and playing for 2 others. The Tigers built momentum first and then found the quarterback to get them over the hump. They did not need the transcendental quarterback simply to gain momentum.
A better comparison might be Jim Harbaugh’s Michigan. Flummoxed by an archrival in Ohio State that was a national power, Harbaugh won plenty of games before capturing a national championship in his 9th year in Ann Arbor, but it took the Wolverines 7 years just to win the B1G title, despite consistent 8-, 9-, and 10-win seasons along the way.
At a blueblood program used to winning, Harbaugh, like Napier, had to convince his administration to invest and commit to competing at the highest level, rather than rest on the program’s logo, brand, and laurels. The journey was long. The juice was worth the squeeze.
But the Harbaugh comparison also feels imperfect, if only because with Lagway, Napier’s time is likely now.
If Napier can’t win big in 2025 and 2026 with DJ, then when, if ever, will he win?
The departure of starting quarterbacks at 2 critical Florida rivals, Georgia and Tennessee, also appears to open the door, if ever so slightly.
Yes, Georgia has the best coach in the sport and plenty of elite talent around him, but if Georgia had DJ Lagway, and not Gunner Stockton, is there any doubt who the prohibitive national championship favorite would be? Georgia is more talented than the Gators. But the questions around Stockton makes Georgia vulnerable, just as teams facing Joe Burrow and LSU were vulnerable in 2019, despite having plenty of talent of their own.
And the departure of Nico Iamaleava at Tennessee, while an admirable and righteous stand by Josh Heupel, begs important questions about a Volunteers program that now loses the SEC Player of the Year in Dylan Sampson and their starting quarterback, two absences that will absolutely be felt in September and October, no matter how well journeyman Joey Aguilar fits on Rocky Top.
Outside of perhaps Austin, Texas, there are questions everywhere you look in the SEC.
In The Swamp, there’s DJ Lagway, a player who answers plenty of Florida’s questions.
Lagway’s likely to spend 2 more seasons in The Swamp before he hears his name called on Thursday night at the 2027 NFL Draft.
How much longer Napier is in Gainesville almost certainly depends on what Napier does with the “DJ Years.”
