I still sometimes think about the first thing I wrote on my first Gator football site, a prologue to the 2006 season. It was meant to sound profound and artistic; the execution in hindsight isn’t as good as I thought at the time. It was a coy way of suggesting that the Gators could win a national title if everything went right, and you know what? Just enough went right that they did.
The only thing I repeated within that piece was the sentiment that the season would be defined by the dynamic between “a coach and a quarterback”. The quarterback in question was not Tim Tebow but rather Chris Leak, who made up half of an odd couple with Urban Meyer. Neither would’ve picked the other from the start — Leak was not a great fit for the 1.0 version of Meyer’s spread option, and each knew it — but here they were with a path to immortality if they could just find a way to reconcile the incompatibilities between them.
I have been thinking lately that the 2024 season might also come down to a coach and a quarterback, though in a much different way than what we saw 18 years ago.
Billy Napier and Graham Mertz mirror each other in some ways. Napier was a hotshot young coach, promoted to play-calling coordinator at age 29. After one good season followed by one bad season, he was fired.
Mertz was and still is the highest-rated quarterback ever signed by Wisconsin. His first game was sterling: 20-for-21, 248 yards (11.8 per attempt), five touchdowns, and no picks against a poor Illinois team. He’s been chasing that performance ever since.
He came close a couple times in some statistical ways against other bad Big Ten teams over the years, but the only outing that compares to lighting up a team, even an awful team, in his first career start was willing the Gators to the win over South Carolina last year. And even then, the Gamecocks were a squad that’d finish 5-7. UF’s own leaky defense was the main reason the heroics were necessary in the first place.
After Clemson fired him, Napier rehabbed in the Nick Saban Home for Wayward Coaches with a year’s detour under Jim McElwain at Colorado State in there. Famously — or infamously, take your pick — he never got the call to the coordinator role in Tuscaloosa. He did for a season at Arizona State before getting the Louisiana head coaching gig. SEC schools did come calling, including Auburn the year before Florida, but they were mostly after his recruiting and management model more than his offensive architecting.
The Mertz era in Madison ran its course without the laurels the Badger faithful dreamed of upon his signing. After he entered the portal, there wasn’t a mad rush for Mertz’s services. The excitement that surrounded his high school recruitment had long since vanished by then.
One coach believed in him more than he believed in any other quarterback in that portal cycle. That’s what the coach says publicly, anyway. The two met up, and it was a match. The rest is history that’s still being written.
The pairing of Napier and Mertz has more immediately shored things up for the latter’s legacy. He walked in the door and set three records in his first year at the helm: most consecutive attempts without a pick (239), most consecutive completions (19), and highest single-season completion percentage (72.9%).
Those records, while better than some possible alternatives, are indicative of a general risk aversion. When Mertz went longer than about 15 yards down the field with throws, things got increasingly dicey. Some passes completed. More didn’t.
Still, Mertz proved to be a gutsy leader who kept the Gators in some games when the defense simply did not pull its weight. With a lesser signal caller, the team goes no better than 4-8 due to dropping the aforementioned game in Columbia.
But while Napier is still waiting for his career boost from coming to Gainesville, it can’t be overlooked that he’s the reason why Mertz is in the orange and blue in the first place. You can’t disentangle the two of them. Mertz legitimately and significantly improved on his performance at Wisconsin in part because he was under Napier’s guidance and running Napier’s offense.
Florida is currently staring down a gauntlet of a schedule, and Napier is on a seat that, depending on who you ask, is anywhere from warm to scalding. While that sounds like a recipe for being too uptight, the best path forward is for Napier and Mertz to help each other let it rip.
Mertz will never be Rex Grossman when it comes to intermediate-to-deep passes, but he really was at his best at Williams-Brice because he was loose and free. The inhibition that he played with prior appeared to melt away through the game, and unfortunately, it would come back some later in the season. The freedom with which he played was fun to watch and quite effective. Carolina’s bad defense gave Mertz license to do that, but the ’24 slate doesn’t offer much room for trying to win with dinking and dunking.
Taking a step back, Mertz’s legacy at Florida is not that different than Feleipe Franks’s at Arkansas. Both were heralded recruits who didn’t live up to that billing at their first schools. Both transferred and had nice rebound years on disappointing teams. If Mertz didn’t come back for another round, his story would be about like that only without the prospect of playing tight end in the NFL.
If Mertz really plays loose and goes for it, it might end poorly. He might not improve on longer throws and toss more interceptions as a result. His completion percentage could tank with fewer easy throws, and he could find his playing time increasingly being eaten into by the guy who’s clearly the future sitting at QB2.
But really, he has nothing to lose. His 2023 performance, despite missing the last game to injury and not winning as many contests as anyone would like, showed that he really was better than how he played at Wisconsin. That issue is off the board. But the legacy he has to protect, such as it is, is once again not all that different than Franks at Arkansas.
Which is to say, Mertz has his name in the UF record book until and unless someone surpasses those marks, but he’s not yet much more than a trivia question answer a couple decades down the road. The ticket to avoiding being Just Another Post-Tebow Quarterback Who’s Not Kyle Trask is by building on ’23 and truly excelling. Excelling against the 2024 schedule means he can’t play it near as safely.
The same goes for Napier, whose standing is much less solid. Every UF coach since Spurrier has won ten games at least once, except Ron Zook and Napier. Zook at least built most of the 2006 title team and never missed a bowl. Napier has turned the talent situation around to a large degree, but it could all go up in smoke if he’s fired thanks to it now being the free-transfer era. The idea of one coach stocking the cupboards for the next one may now be obsolete.
If the South Carolina game was Mertz’s peak in ’23, the Tennessee game was Napier’s. They couldn’t be more different of examples, though. The game in Columbia showed the value of Mertz really letting loose. The game against the Vols showed the peril of Napier’s conservative nature.
UF managed to run up an unexpectedly large 26-7 halftime lead. Napier called just four pass plays, and the Gators scored only three points, after the break. The gamble afoot was that Joe Milton wasn’t accurate enough on deep balls to bring UT back. A big reason why the Gators were up so much at the half was Milton’s scattershot passing, after all. And in fact, the bet did pay off in the end.
But Milton didn’t complete zero deep balls, and in fact he hit on one to pull within two scores midway through the fourth quarter. Napier responded with six straight run plays, and afterward the Vols had the ball with three-and-a-half minutes to go with a deficit of 13. Dire straits for the Gators? Obviously not, but it was a defense with an emerging habit of allowing big plays against a quarterback who could throw it a mile. It wasn’t game over either.
Mertz and Napier both need to open it up and be more aggressive than they were a season ago. There are reasons why they acted as they did last year that have nothing to do with nebulous concepts like “legacy” and more to do with a lack of proven depth at receiver, a relative paucity of time working together, and a defense that was about as trustworthy at holding a lead as a preschooler is at guarding a bowl of candy.
All three of those issues should be better in 2024. Tre Wilson and Kahleil Jackson return out wide after major roles, and Elijhah Badger and Chimere Dike (a former Mertz teammate at UW) add to their experience. Mertz has spent an entire extra year in the system compared to last season. Ron Roberts taking over as something akin to the head coach of the defense with a number of key transfers bolstering the two-deep should stop the bleeding and finally lead to some level of improvement.
Most, if not all, of the obvious issues from a year ago have been addressed in some way or another. All that’s left is for a coach and a quarterback to let go of their hesitations and put the excessive small ball in the past.
The 2024 campaign will largely be about Napier and Mertz. Their fates are entwined. Neither can truly stand out without the other standing right there with him. It’s not a question of whether they will go down in program history together, but rather it’s about how they will shape their position in that history with how much they do or don’t act aggressively this fall.