DJ Lagway’s departure is unfortunate but likely is for the best for both him and Florida

I don’t know DJ Lagway. I’ve never met him. I’m not his doctor, nor have spoken to his doctor, nor do I especially know much about medicine. With that said, I think it’s likely best for both parties that Lagway has chosen to leave Florida via the transfer portal.

Not long after the news of his planned departure hit, there was a story at CBS Sports that heavily used quotes from the Lagway camp. The key passage for me in the story is this:

With a fully healthy offseason, a source close to Lagway believes he can regain his place among the top quarterbacks in the country.

“Give him a full offseason of moving around being healthy, I can only imagine what he’ll look like next year,” the source said.

That’s probably true. A fully healthy Lagway would be a sight to behold. I’m just not sure we’ve ever seen a fully healthy Lagway for all that long, and I don’t know if we ever will.

He had his hamstring problem a year ago and missed almost all of the ensuing offseason due to “lower body” and shoulder problems. And again, not a doctor here, but Lagway looked physically uncomfortable more often than not when he was able to play. Even at times this fall when he was supposed to be at or close to 100%, he’d sometimes do something like suddenly throw a pass while planting with his front foot instead of his back and then have a labored gait back to the sideline.

To be clear, his mechanics were a mess regardless of health. Some of that dated back to 2024 too: jumping while throwing, unnecessary sidearms, not planting his feet, pressing when adversity hit. On top of doing something to get his body healthy, whether it’s rest or rehab or a procedure of some sort, he needs real work to become a consistent proper passer and not just a thrower who can pull off a wow moment on occasion.

I don’t know if that situation is compatible with new head coach Jon Sumrall. He’s seems to be a win-now kind of coach, if his introductory presser is to be believed, the exact opposite of Billy Napier and his “sit tight, this is going to take a while” approach we heard about from the start with him. Sumrall walked in the door at Troy and promptly won the Sun Belt Conference twice. He went to the AAC championship game his first year at Tulane, and then after his roster was picked over pretty badly by P4 schools, he retooled the team and then won the American in his second.

Lagway might be able to be a championship contending P4 quarterback this year; the future is unknown, and I don’t have the information to definitively say otherwise. Maybe Billy Napier’s offense was the main problem for him. It was for Tre Wilson. As soon as Napier was dismissed and Wilson’s position coach took over, Tre immediately got nine catches to more than double his season-long yardage total with 121 and a touchdown against the tough Georgia defense.

I tend to think it’s going to take Lagway a year to get there, if he can at all, and that’s probably not compatible with what the Florida quarterback spot has become. It’s a win-now kind of job, and if he can’t prove that he can win at a high level in a spring practice competition, he won’t reestablish himself as the clear QB1.

Lagway has been a multi-year starter now, having finished 2024 as the starter once Graham Mertz went down and played all of 2025 as the starter. It would be completely understandable if he wanted to go to a different school that made him promises about being the starter if healthy. There are dozens of P4 schools out there, and most do not have quarterbacks with Lagway’s raw talent. If he can demonstrate to someone that he has a path to being completely healthy, someone like his home state’s Baylor or Bill Belichick’s UNC could reasonably promise him the starter’s job.

But if you want to win now, you can’t promise an oft injured player with a two-year history of bad habits the starting job. If there’s not an entrenched starter at a position, then you have to find either a no-doubt new starter in the portal or a couple of guys with potential and have them battle it out. That’s the new normal of college football for places that don’t want to be longterm developmental programs.

Sumrall talked about the importance of recruiting and has hired good recruiters to his staff, so it’s not like he’s going the Deion Sanders route of trying to build nearly entirely through transfers. However this Florida team just went 4-8, and it will need a lot of new blood to replace some good graduating seniors and also younger players who aren’t playing at a high SEC level. Nothing Sumrall has done suggests he’ll be happy with a 6-6 first year while building to Year 2, so I don’t think he’d go for taking 2026 for rehabbing Lagway’s body while breaking down and rebuilding his mechanics to aim for a breakthrough 2027.

There also is the matter that Lagway will be expensive to keep, even after his disappointing 2025, because there will be someone like Baylor or UNC out there willing to promise him a sizable revenue share payment to be the starter. Texas Tech showed this year that going with a good-but-not-great quarterback while loading up on very skilled players elsewhere can be a viable path to the playoff.

I don’t know if Sumrall and new Florida GM Dave Caldwell are necessarily looking to go that route on purpose, but these kinds of considerations matter given a fixed revenue sharing cap and the end of pay-for-play NIL due to the House settlement. UF has a lot of portal needs, so downsizing the quarterback portion of the budget to provide more dollars for bolstering the offensive line or safety spot would make sense.

What Florida wants and what Lagway needs are no longer the same thing. I wish him well and hope he as a Jeff Driskel-like experience where a fresh start propels him to a real NFL career. It’s unfortunate it didn’t work out in Gainesville, but shaking hands and moving on is probably best for both player and school.