As we all expected, Billy Napier named Graham Mertz the starting quarterback. The only mystery is why it took all the way to last Friday to get there. Mertz had gotten the lion’s share of first-team reps in fall camp, and he has vastly more experience than Jack Miller does. The simple answer is probably that Napier just wanted to get through the first scrimmage to be sure, and that happened to be on Thursday.
Whatever the reason, we all knew this was coming once Florida went into the spring semester without a second portal quarterback. There have been reports from multiple outlets, though typically in things like tweets and offhanded podcast comments than actual published articles, that UF was after other veteran QBs.
I don’t have sources, but from what I’ve seen, I think it’s likely true that Florida at the very least kicked the tires on Tulane’s Michael Pratt and Coastal Carolina’s Grayson McCall. Pratt never ended up formally entering the portal, though McCall did in late December before withdrawing on New Year’s Day. I’m not accusing anyone of tampering here — everyone knows someone who knows someone who can put feelers out without crossing any lines — but the plan wasn’t Mertz or bust.
As a side note, it’s almost insulting to Napier to still run across people out there mocking Napier for supposedly putting all his eggs in the Mertz basket. Napier is a former quarterback and quite a smart individual. He knows that UF can’t reach its goals with the Mertz who played in red and white. Given Miller’s struggles in the bowl, albeit with a lot of key compatriots missing, landing Mertz to battle with another experienced starter like those named above makes a lot more sense. And, it’s highly likely that was the actual plan.
Anyway, the various reports from Thursday’s scrimmage were positive about Mertz. The consensus is that he completed a high number of passes, possibly in the 70% kind of range, and did a good job spreading the ball around to receivers, backs, and tight ends.
This is all good to hear, especially since it seemed like last year that Anthony Richardson might have trouble completing 70% on air. AR did hit the 70% mark against Utah (17-of-24) and 80% against FCS Eastern Washington (a mere 8-of-10), but he had more games under 50% (three) than at 61% or above (just those two against UU and EWU).
A scrimmage is somewhere between throwing on air and an actual game, so bully for Mertz. But as we all know, completion percentage is not the only important aspect of the job. If I told you that Mertz completes two-thirds of his passes against the Utes, that sounds pretty good, right? It’s a crisp 66.7% on the day. But if it’s 22-for-33 for 167 yards with one TD and two picks, well, that sounds much less good.
I want to take a trip into the land of passing efficiency now. It’s kind of an old statistic as far as they go, and it has its issues. It overweights yards per attempt and touchdowns, the latter of which are less in the quarterback’s control than most basic stats. However it is a publicly defined formula, unlike ESPN’s proprietary Total QBR measure for instance, so I can at least look at it and evaluate it to be able to say it overweights YPA and TDs.
Even with its drawbacks, I still like to use it for my own purposes. The calculations of it go back pretty far since it’s been a standard NCAA stat for so long, so that helps for limited comparisons across time. I use the abbreviation “PE” for passing efficiency to save a lot of keystrokes.
An average PE these days is somewhere from the high 130s to low 140s. A player who’s getting into the 150s is having a good year, and above 160 is a excellent year. It used to be that only a handful of players broke 160 in a year, but even now with as high powered as offenses are getting, just nine in the whole country would be a healthy number.
Going higher, 170s is starting to get into Heisman territory if you’re on a good P5 team. Kyle Trask hit 180 in 2020, and the recent run of Oklahoma guys who were winning the Heisman or at least being a finalist were in the 190s. Conversely, the 130s are below average, the 120s are bad, and with anything lower you’re just hoping the dude won’t make catastrophic big mistakes.
Mertz’s Wisconsin stat lines had his PE largely in the 120s the last couple of seasons, and I don’t know enough about how the Badgers ran their offense to make a solid comparison.
What I can do is blend his Wisconsin work with some general parameters from Napier’s past signal callers to get a idea of what may be coming. Using a completion percentage of 64%, 27 pass attempts per game, 7.8 yards per completion, 20 TDs, and ten INTs, we get a passing efficiency of 143. That’s around average, and it’s something that can keep UF in a lot of games this fall.
The expected dependence on the run means going far above average in PE is simply not necessary to make strides versus last year. The defense was wretched at times, and improving that side of the ball is the bigger need over trying to improve the offense, really. If the Gators can average about 32 points per game in the regular season as they did in 2022, that’ll be a terrific coaching job by Napier.
An immediate hot take I saw after Wisconsin let Paul Chryst go is that Mertz was really the one who managed to get him fired. Chryst had a track record of QB development, and Mertz was his highest-rated recruit under center.
That take might have it backwards. Chryst had done good things for QBs previously, but he was still running too many things that Scott Tolzien would recognize. Chryst got fired for multiple reasons, and I don’t think that “because Mertz stinks” is one of them.
Napier has the chance to offer Mertz a more up-to-date attack with a lot more skill position speed. I think we’re about to find out just how much more room under the ceiling that Mertz has, and I’ll bet it’s more than just a little.