It doesn’t take too much thought to guess who Florida’s top two receivers were last year. Obviously, they were Elijhah Badger and Chimere Dike. You might not know who was first and who was second — Badger led in yards, Dike in catches — but they were far and away the top two.
But who was Florida’s third-leading receiver? Was it one of the tight ends, Arlis Boardingham or Hayden Hansen? Maybe one of the backs out of the backfield? Perhaps Aidan Mizell? He’d randomly have big games.
Nope. None of them. In both yards and catches, UF’s third-leading receiver played in just four games. Believe it or not, it was Tre Wilson and his 19 catches and 266 yards. Even if you toss out his one catch for 40 yards in his final game against Kentucky, he still ties Boardingham for third in catches and stays 19 yards ahead of Hansen for third in yards. Wilson could’ve had a much bigger season had he stayed healthy.
And yet, it’s not completely clear that he would have approached Badger and Dike in effectiveness. How Wilson fits into the offense is, surprisingly, a question that needs answered in 2025.
Wilson has incredible speed and agility. The way Billy Napier largely used those traits in Wilson’s freshman year of 2023 was to create space where there wasn’t any.
It didn’t take defenses long to figure out that Graham Mertz wasn’t comfortable throwing intermediate-to-long passes, and he wasn’t the most accurate when he did. His completion rate beyond about 15 yards downfield wasn’t anything to keep opposing defensive coordinators up at night. So, defenses largely crowded the field within ten to 15 yards past the line of scrimmage. The occasional shot play might open things up temporarily, but the Gator offense didn’t have a ton of room to work.
That’s where Wilson came in. Once Napier showed a willingness to heavily feature Wilson against Tennessee, an effort that unfortunately ended extremely early due to injury, defenses made sure they kept track of him at all times. And so Napier would seemingly make Wilson run a 10K’s worth of distance pre-snap throughout a game to force defenses to account for him and reveal their coverage secrets. And Wilson would get a lot of short passes, screens, pop passes, and end arounds to ensure defenses never let up on tracking him.
Wilson was at or near the top of the lists of most important Florida players going into 2024. From a close observer’s perspective, it was going to be of interest to see how his role expanded with another offseason’s worth of growth and development.
Through one game, it looked like nothing much changed. Wilson’s role within the offense made for Mertz appeared to be about the same as in 2023 against Miami.
But then we got an A/B test with Mertz out for Week 2’s game against Samford. How would Wilson’s role change with DJ Lagway running the show? The offense was going to have the same bedrock principles, but Lagway is a very different quarterback than Mertz is. He has a much better long ball game but, as is common for big-armed freshmen, many more issues with touch on short passes.
Wilson stayed in motion a lot, but his only target came on a broken-up 4th Down checkdown just before the half that Lagway delivered late. A pop pass and a deep shot for Wilson started the second half, though the latter was in triple coverage and didn’t connect. Only one throw after the break appeared to be in the natural flow of the offense — meaning a play where the quarterback was supposed to shop for options and not just throw it to Wilson — and the triple-coverage deep shot aside, it was the only pass more than a couple of yards past the line of scrimmage.
Against Tennessee, neither Mertz nor Lagway attempted a pass to Wilson that was more than about nine or ten yards upfield. The aforementioned 40-yard pass in the Kentucky game was on a deep route, but it was his only catch (and even target) in 40 snaps.
So the question remains: who is Wilson in a Lagway-helmed offense?
It could be that between the injury that Wilson suffered against Samford and Napier’s plan-heavy approach that there just wasn’t enough room to adjust usage during the season. Wilson did only play in four games, after all, and even after the impressive Samford performance, Lagway was supposed to be little more than a changeup. Wilson had an important role in the Mertz-led scheme, one that no one else on the team really could replicate, so that’s what he was prepared for all offseason.
But that said, it’s not a full use of Wilson’s talents to pigeonhole him into the very limited number of things he did when Mertz was behind center. It’s like the old pre-2020 Kadarius Toney plan, minus the occasional passing attempt. Toney, by his own admission, didn’t get serious about becoming a complete player until after 2019, but I don’t think that’s been an issue for Wilson as far as I have seen.
Florida picked up a veteran receiver from the portal in J. Michael Sturdivant, but he has never led a team in receiving like Badger and Dike did before coming to Gainesville. There’s also only one of him, though UF did pick up Badger over the summer to go with the much earlier commitment of Dike.
Whether another portal arrival comes or not, Florida needs Wilson to realize his full potential in order to keep making steps forward. A big part of that will be him getting healthy. Just as big a part is Napier and his offensive assistants figuring out what Wilson looks like beyond pop passes, screens, and a once-a-game deep shot in the Lagway offense.