O’Gara: Graham Mertz is out for the year, but not before he proved me and so many others wrong

It was supposed to be a joke.

Three weeks after the transfer portal window opened, we found out that Anthony Richardson’s successor as Florida’s QB1 wasn’t going to be someone at the top of any lists of available quarterbacks. It was going to be Graham Mertz, AKA the former U.S. Army All-American Bowl MVP who struggled to live up to the hype in 3 years as Wisconsin’s starter.

Mind you, that was on the heels of the future No. 4 overall pick struggling in his first and only season in Billy Napier’s offense. The idea that Mertz was going to step in and suddenly play his best football at Florida against SEC competition seemed ambitious, at best.

Hence, the corresponding joke I made on the app formerly known as Twitter:

Graham Mertz to Florida feels like when you go to the grocery store having not eaten anything all day and instead of coming back with a giant steak for yourself, you panic and get a Hungry Man frozen dinner.

— Connor O’Gara (@cjogara) December 21, 2022

Nearly 2 years after that incredibly specific analogy, Mertz suffered a torn ACL in an overtime loss against Tennessee. His season is over, and barring a medical redshirt (something we shouldn’t rule out after Mertz played in just 5 games in 2024), he’s thrown his last collegiate pass. At the very least, the emergence of true freshman DJ Lagway makes it almost a forgone conclusion that Mertz has thrown his last pass in a Florida uniform.

But hand up — the joke is on me.

Mertz did what skeptics like myself thought was impossible. During an unstable time, he was the most steady thing about Florida. Napier’s assurance that he was the top quarterback in the transfer portal was a belly laugh-inducing comment at the time for folks like me, but looking back, how far off was that take at all?

There’s no doubt that Mertz outperformed fellow transfer Devin Leary — I realize Leary won that head-to-head matchup with Kentucky, but you’re out of your mind if you suggest that he was better than Mertz — and you could argue that he was more effective than a slew of other QBs who were in that post-regular season portal at the end of 2022.

Ask yourself this. How many of these guys were better than Mertz?

• Devin Leary, Kentucky
• Sam Hartman, Notre Dame
• Hudson Card, Purdue
• Walker Howard, Ole Miss
• Brennan Armstrong, NC State
• Tanner Mordecai, Wisconsin
• DJ Uiagalelei, Oregon State
• Collin Schlee, UCLA
• Luke Altmyer, Illinois
• Sam Jackson V, California

(Note that I didn’t include Shedeur Sanders, who technically was a portal quarterback but he was never playing anywhere but for his dad at Colorado.)

I cut the list off at that spot because in the 247sports rankings, those were the portal QBs who were ranked ahead of Mertz at the time. You could make a real argument that Mertz was the best of all of them.

In 16 games at Florida, Mertz had a 26-5 TD-INT ratio and he averaged 8.2 yards/attempt with a 159.1 QB rating. A year after he finished No. 3 in FBS with a 72.9% completion percentage — something that was mentioned on basically every Florida broadcast — he was the FBS leader at 76.6% in 2024.

Could he have made the throw that Lagway made to force overtime at Tennessee? Nope. Could he have run away from an entire defense like Richardson did against LSU? Absolutely not.

But for the limitations that Mertz had to his game, in many ways, he should be even more appreciated for the things he did sandwiched between those 2 freakishly talented Florida quarterbacks. Before that throw on Saturday night, Lagway looked like he was being swallowed whole by that loaded Tennessee defense in Neyland. And for all the highlight reel plays during Richardson’s brief Florida career, his fatal flaw was that he so rarely could keep an offense on schedule and operate an offensive game plan for 60 minutes.

Mertz should be the model for how a transitional quarterback operates. That’s what Florida brought him in to be, initially under the impression that he would pass the baton to Jaden Rashada, but quickly, that fell apart, and it shifted to him bridging the gap to Lagway.

In turbulent times, Mertz did that. It’s not his fault that for the majority of his time at Florida, the Gators’ defense has been in the midst of its worst stretch since the pre-Steve Spurrier era.

(I’ll let you decide if I’m referring to Spurrier, the coach, or Spurrier, the player. Both play.)

Mertz bought into Napier’s vision and operated in a system that often had him playing behind an overmatched and/or inexperienced offensive line. This will be Mertz’s third time missing at least 1 game due to injury at Florida, but “a lack of durability” would be a lazy way to describe that. If you watched this Florida offensive line since the start of 2023, it’s a minor miracle that Mertz didn’t spend even more time on the shelf.

And if you talked to Mertz since his arrival at Florida, you might consider it a minor miracle that it took so long in his college career for him to figure things out on the field. Off the field, he checks every box.

At SEC Media Days, I know in talking to plenty of fellow non-local media members, Mertz impressed us. It’s hard to describe how he comes across in that media scrum, but the best way I’d sum it up is this — you just get the sense that he has everything under control.

That’s exactly how I felt about Mertz’s time in Gainesville. Some will link him to this brutal stretch in the Napier era and keep it moving, but I can’t help but feel that Mertz could’ve stopped some of that bleeding.

Last year at Mizzou, he got hurt for the first time at Florida. That was late in the third quarter of a 23-21 game in which Mertz had just led consecutive touchdown drives against the No. 9 Tigers, who held on in a back-and-forth game. Florida could’ve clinched bowl eligibility. Instead, it lost 5 in a row to end the season, including the following week against unbeaten Florida State when Florida mustered 232 yards of offense in a rock fight loss between backup quarterbacks.

Shoot, go back to Mertz’s final play on Saturday at Tennessee. It was a touchdown pass to Arlis Boardingham, which took tremendous anticipation at the time of his release. That on-target throw gave Florida a 10-0 lead at No. 8 Tennessee. If Mertz finishes that game, does it even come down to Napier making a PAT decision? I don’t think so. That’s not a knock on Lagway, but look at the first 5 Mertz-less Florida drives after the injury:

• Interception
• Downs
• Punt
• Punt
• Punt

Florida gained 40 yards of offense on those 5 drives with Lagway in for Mertz. Anybody could see the difference. Up until that 3rd-and-18 touchdown throw for the ages by Lagway, Tennessee feasted on a true freshman quarterback. A proven 6th-year player like Mertz probably handles that differently.

But we’ll never know that. All we know is that Mertz’s presence should be celebrated a whole lot more than his absence.

To be clear, “absence” strictly refers to physically being in the huddle on fall Saturdays. Mertz released a statement, wherein he said “during my recovery, I will remain a part of the program and do whatever I can in meeting rooms and from the sidelines to help my teammates win.”

I don’t doubt that. I might have doubted Mertz upon his arrival, but I’d be foolish to doubt him upon his exit.

To anyone who does that, well, the joke’s on you.

Connor O'Gara

Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.