Defenses have figured out DJ Lagway. Can he adjust to the adjustment and save Florida’s season?
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GAINESVILLE — What’s wrong with DJ Lagway?
Where do Lagway and the Florida Gators go from here?
What do you do next when you go from being a preseason Heisman Trophy candidate and campus celebrity to having disgruntled fans calling for your backup in a matter of 3 weeks of football games?
These are among the questions swirling around Florida’s immensely talented sophomore quarterback DJ Lagway as the 1-2 Gators prepare to travel to south Florida where No. 4 Miami awaits Saturday night at Hard Rock Stadium (7:44 p.m. ET, ABC).
Scrutiny is the nature of the beast when you play quarterback at Florida, where 3 Heisman winners and 5 Heisman finalists have lined up under center and a patron saint of southern sidelines, Steve Spurrier, is canonized for not just winning the Heisman but dragging the 3 yards and a cloud of dust SEC of the 1980s out of the stone ages and into the modern world.
The fishbowl of being QB1 at Florida gets even smaller when you go out and throw 5 interceptions, as Lagway did last weekend in a 20-10 loss at No. 3 LSU.
Lagway’s errors, often as simple as uncharacteristic late reads or simple overthrows, have fans and media types flummoxed.
Even Spurrier is perplexed. This week, in an appearance on the Dooley Noted podcast by longtime Gainesville Sun great journalist Pat Dooley, Spurrier said Lagway “looked off.”
Lagway has promised to respond.
“I’ve never had a performance like that in my life, so it’s kind of hard to process it,” Lagway said after the LSU game, before adding: “It’s all about how you bounce back. How do you respond to adversity? I’m planning to do so.”
Questions linger.
Is he still hurt after missing the spring with a shoulder injury he originally suffered in high school but re-aggravated last season in a win over LSU?
Is he rusty, given he missed spring ball and, after suffering a calf injury late in the summer, didn’t play 11-on-11 in practice until the final week of camp?
Is Billy Napier’s play calling and offense simply a crusty recipe for reptilian regression?
Some of these questions require a more urgent answer than others.
It was probably unfair to dub Lagway the “savior” of Florida football when, as a 5-star high school recruit and the Gatorade National Player of the Year in 2023, he defied convention and stuck with a commitment to Billy Napier and Florida despite the young head coach posting a record of 12-14 in Years 1 and 2 at UF and having little in the way of proof of concept.
Lagway’s commitment was, without question, a huge deal.
Lagway received a prestigious Elite 11 quarterback camp invitee, won the High School Heisman and led tiny Willis High School to a district championship in big-time Houston-area prep football, all indicators of his prodigious talent that made him one of Florida’s biggest football recruiting victories in years —perhaps, as I wrote in this space at the time, the biggest pure recruiting win since Tim Tebow.
As a true freshman, he consistently demonstrated why hype was warranted. Lagway finished first in the country among 27 true freshman to play in 2025 in quarterback rating, whether you use the flawed college football efficiency metric or the vastly superior adjusted quarterback rating system deployed in the NFL. Lagway’s overall pass efficiency rating (154.93) ranked 10th in the country overall in 2024, and his NFL adjusted quarterback rating ranked 9th in the country.
Cynics and haters have pointed to the high interception number in 2024 (9), growing louder as Lagway’s struggled early in the 2025 campaign.
But the numbers paint a different story. They show a young quarterback who was outstanding as a freshman and has played the worst football of his young career as a sophomore.
In 2024, only 6 of Lagway’s 9 interceptions came on “turnover worthy” passes, per PFF. That means Lagway threw 3 interceptions a season ago that shouldn’t have happened but did, whether due to a tipped ball by his own receiver (2) or a spectacular play by a defensive back (1). On the season, Lagway finished with just 7 turnover worthy passes in 2024. He has tied that number in 3 games in 2025. Yikes.
In 2024, Lagway finished second in the SEC, behind only Jaxson Dart, in average depth of target (11.8) and yards per attempt (10). Lagway ranked first in the SEC in “big time throws” per attempts (8.8%), per PFF. A season later, Lagway is averaging just 6.3 yards per attempt (a 3.7-yard drop off!) and his big time throw percentage per attempts is 3.8%, which ranks 12th among SEC starters. Yikes again.
These grisly numbers aren’t just about the LSU game.
Lagway had 2 drops in Florida’s upset loss to South Florida, including one by Vernell Brown III late that if caught likely seals a narrow win for Florida.
But Lagway actually made more big-time throws (2-1) against LSU than he did South Florida, and against LSU, he at least led a full length of the field touchdown drive. Florida’s lone touchdown against South Florida came on a short field after a huge Brown III punt return.
That’s 2 consecutive “off” performances and, given that Lagway himself felt Florida “didn’t play its best ball” in Week 1 against lowly FCS foe Long Island, there’s more than sufficient data to be concerned.
But why is Lagway struggling? And can it be fixed?
Napier spent an offseason preaching that while Lagway wasn’t playing physically beyond a few handoffs in the spring, he was getting the “mental reps” necessary to improve as a quarterback.
Flash forward several months later, and Napier’s finally acknowledging rust and a lack of timing may be a factor, not just in Lagway’s game as a passer, but in Florida’s entire offensive operation.
“DJ’s got to continue to improve as we go,” Napier told the media this week. “I think we have to keep things in perspective here relative to how much experience he has, the offseason that he’s been through. I think it’s important to evaluate things from that perspective and not necessarily on one performance.”
In other words, Lagway’s rusty and a little behind. The offensive line struggles are related to this too, according to Napier, who acknowledged when I asked late last week that timing and precision with Florida’s first team group have been “off” this season and that it was a “healthy assumption” that some of those struggles had to do with the first unit offensive line spending most of its time with backup quarterback Trammel Jones throughout fall camp.
DJ is getting used to playing again. DJ’s teammates are getting used to DJ.
But perhaps bigger than all of that is the reality that defenses are getting used to DJ.
Lagway’s first interception against LSU was a tremendous example of the way defenses are adjusting to Lagway’s gargantuan talent as a downfield thrower.
Florida is running an inverted smash concept. Sitting in a 2-high look, LSU shows pressure in the middle but ultimately brings only 4, dropping a linebacker just “under” the 2 high safeties. Once the free LSU defender attaches to a shoddily run corner route, the play is doomed.
Could Lagway have read this better and tried to seam route? Probably. But he missed it. Two-high, 3-under and “Cover 7 man-match” looks are increasingly common in college football, especially on third and long. Lagway is seeing a healthy diet of those 2 looks, which were the only defenses LSU played (save 1 creeper pressure), on Florida’s 13 third-down passing attempts. Lagway finished 6-for-13 for 57 yards with 4 interceptions on third down against the Tigers.
If the formula isn’t broke, defensive coordinators aren’t going to rush to fix it.
Defenses have adjusted to Lagway. Can DJ adjust to the adjustment?
Once again, Billy Napier’s future at Florida may depend on it.
That’s a heady thing and big ask for a 20-year-old, no matter how mature or high character, which are qualities Lagway possesses in spades.
In the end, demanding task or no, it’s DJ Lagway, the man with all the questions swirling about him, who is the only Gator who can provide answers to what ails Florida football in 2025.
Neil Blackmon covers SEC football and basketball for SaturdayDownSouth.com. An attorney, he is also a member of the Football and Basketball Writers Associations of America. He also coaches basketball.
