Florida ended the 2024 season on a hot streak and is attracting genuine positive preseason attention for the first time in a while. And yet, this year’s might be the quietest spring practice session I’ve seen in some time. Florida’s annual spring game is Saturday, but it is not exactly the culmination of a wave of increasing attention.
In one sense, it’s entirely explicable. There are two things that generate excitement in spring practice: stars and position battles. Will last year’s standouts progress in their development? Who will come on strong and win a contest for playing time?
UF has no bigger star than quarterback DJ Lagway. However, a sore shoulder has him almost not throwing at all in practice. There have been reports of him throwing maybe three or so balls in one closed-door session, so it’s not zero, but it’s effectively zero. Therefore, all we have from the staff to use for coverage of Lagway is the cliches about recovering players: mental reps, he’s a “coach on the field”, and so on.
Florida has other notable players for sure. No one stands out like a quarterback, though. That’s especially true at UF, a program defined by that position more than any other spot on the field. Plus, the Gators didn’t land any headlining players from the portal. They supplemented in key spots, but there’s no one who was dominating highlight packages last year who came via transfer. Florida’s NIL operation largely spent its money on retaining the current roster and on the ’25 high school recruiting class.
Also, most of Florida’s top spots are known. Lagway is the no-doubt starter as long as he’s healthy. Jadan Baugh and Ja’Kobi Jackson will be the top runners. Four of the five offensive line starters return, and Bryce Lovett emerged as the top right tackle option early. Tre Wilson and J. Michael Sturdivant are, also health pending, almost certainly going to be the primary targets by a decent margin over everyone else. Hayden Hansen will be the tight end we see the most, and maybe one of the rest will emerge as a clear second.
On defense, again, the top spots are well defined. The front four will be Tyreak Sapp, Jamari Lyons, Caleb Banks, and George Gumbs. The Gators signed a lot of great freshman talent in the secondary, but they’re all battling for backup spots behind the starting four of Devin Moore, Dijon Johnson, Jordan Castell, and Bryce Thornton. There are some questions about star, but only because of injury recovery. Aaron Gates and Sharif Denson, in some order, will likely man that spot the most as they did last year.
The closest thing to a real position battle might be linebacker, where the still-recovering Grayson Howard has not been playing. The question is mainly whether Myles Graham or Aaron Chiles can steal snaps from Jaden Robinson. The thing is, this is not that juicy of a battle because UF will probably rotate guys a fair amount. It’ll be good to know who will be getting the first snaps of the game, but we’ll probably see a lot of all four of those dudes.
Oh yeah, and you may have noticed that the men’s basketball team has generated a few headlines of late. Their roller coaster ride through the tournament that ended in a national title ate up a lot of attention that might’ve otherwise gone to the gridiron.
There is some intrigue, to be sure, even if most of it is not about the top line of the depth chart. There are plenty of freshmen to watch, such as edge Jayden Woods and legacies like Ben Hanks and Vernell Brown III. I am particularly interested in seeing how the freshman receiver signees like Brown, Naeshaun Montgomery, and especially Dallas Brown look when not merely doing footwork drills and catching passes against air. Even that, though, is blunted by Lagway not being available to go.
I will admit that my perception of a lack of excitement and big story lines could just be me. My wife is in the military, and she got orders to Pearl Harbor this spring. Let me tell you, there’s a lot of work required to get a family of four ready to move from Jacksonville to Hawai’i. I haven’t been following general coverage as obsessively as normal for that reason.
But also, I don’t feel like I’ve been missing as much as I could’ve been. Billy Napier has been working for years to produce a team that fits the mold he wants, and he has finally done it. The big suspense was months ago, seeing if guys like Sapp, Banks, Austin Barber, and Jake Slaughter would return to school or go pro while watching others like Jack Pyburn and TJ Searcy hit the portal.
Towards the beginning of spring, Ron Roberts gave a fairly standard statement about the practice session focusing on building depth. It was a boilerplate quote, but which boilerplate quotes coaches choose to deploy can still be telling. Building depth is a different task than finding your starting 11, and Roberts didn’t have to focus on that starting 11. The Gators pretty much knew who that would be on both sides of the ball. One or two spots on each side had some questions, but that’s it.
The flip side of lacking intrigue in spring practice is a lack of drama in spring practice — Lagway’s shoulder aside. In the current era, there will always be a question of who and how many will hit the portal after spring, but that unavoidable matter is it.
Florida knows who and what it is right now. That’s a good thing, and it allows for more fun and experimentation in the Orange and Blue Game should the coaches want to take the opportunity. The main question left is not what this 2025 team is, but whether it’ll be good enough come fall.