Four intriguing observations following Florida Football's massive win over LSU

One week after getting eviscerated by Texas, Florida Football had their signature moment of 2024 with a 27-16 win over LSU to give the Gators their first win over the Tigers since 2018.

Some things went to script, while others were not expected. With that in mind, here are four key observations from Florida's win.

DJ Lagway breaks the meta for typical football

Lagway's final completion rate was 50%, going 13/26. Florida had the ball for just 18 minutes compared to the 41 minutes LSU had the ball. The Gators ran just 43 plays to the 92 that the Tigers had.

But Florida still put up 27 points on the night because on his 13 completions, he averaged over 17 yards per completion.

All three of Florida's touchdown drives were five plays or less, and that's with two of those three going for at least 75 yards.

Compared to the typical 10+ play dink and dunk drives Florida was trying to do under Graham Mertz, this style of saying screw it and go long shows why explosive plays matter, something that has been lacking in the Billy Napier Era.

Trey Smack will get an invite to an NFL camp

There are times when we would like to see Smack be a bit more consistent. See his miss against Texas last week or his miss in overtime against Tennessee as examples of that.

But he has a strong enough leg that someone in the NFL is going to at least give him a look when he graduates next year (assuming he doesn't leave to go pro this year).

Lost in the Lagway hype is the fact that Smack made a 49 and 55-yard kick. Had he missed both of those, neither of which are automatic for a college kicker, Florida would have been trailing prior to the 55-yard touchdown from Jadan Baugh.

The defensive line flipped the script

The thing about sports is that no matter what the stats and analytics say, there are nights like last night when something happens that absolutely no one could have predicted.

LSU came into the game having just given up six sacks total and their sack percentage against (times sacked compared to number of dropbacks) was top five in the country.

Florida's defensive line, meanwhile, has been much maligned at times this season, so everyone assumed LSU had the advantage in the trenches.

But the Gators managed seven sacks on Garrett Nussmeier, with two from Shemar James and one from Tyreak Sapp, Caleb Banks, George Gumbs, T.J. Searcy, and Kamran James.

These were key sacks, too, that frequently stalled out LSU drives that were constantly in Gator territory. It was the ultimate bend but don't break performance.

People are hell-bent on giving Billy Napier his flowers

Last week, we wrote, "Florida Football fans are being gaslit to believe this is normal." We noted that the loss to Texas was the 7th loss by at least 17 points in the Billy Napier Era. Even Ron Zook only had five losses by that margin.

So, while scores of national personalities like Kirk Herbstreit, Tim Brando, and Booger McFarland are coming out of the woodwork to tell the haters to give Napier his due, we here at Hail Florida Hail are just going to quietly say the following three things:

1. Three weeks ago, we said on this site that LSU was beatable. This is the same LSU squad that lost to USC (the one with academic standards) to open the season and came into The Swamp with back-to-back blowout losses to Texas A&M and Alabama.
2. DJ Lagway can win without Billy Napier, but Billy Napier can't win without DJ Lagway.
3. Napier's "signature" win that is supposed to make us forget about the 15+ other coaching malpractice moments he has had was against a squad that is going to be unranked come Tuesday.

We have seen countless times in the Billy Napier Era where Florida gets a big win only to lay a complete egg the following week. With Ole Miss coming to town needing just two more wins to make the playoffs, it is a chance for Napier to prove things have really changed.