Why not Max Brown?
Evaluating the Gators' QB choices for 2023

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If you’ve spent any time following Florida football over the past few months, you’ve probably heard pundits argue about whether Graham Mertz or Jack Miller should be the starting quarterback. After looking at their profiles, I’m left asking the question: why not Max Brown?

Currently a redshirt freshman, Brown is pulling double-duty attending both spring practices for the football team and trying to crack the lineup as an outfielder for the Gators baseball team. Neither of those is a small feat by itself.

Certainly, I understand that the baseball angle probably makes folks question Brown’s ability to win the starting job at QB. After all, Billy Napier wouldn’t let him play baseball if he was really considering him to be the starter, would he?

I do think that thinking has merit, but it also is missing a couple of key details.

First, Brown was a star baseball player in high school who only played QB his junior and senior years. Baseball has pull for those who love it (just ask Michael Jordan), and taking a season to figure out whether he can hack it at the college level is a way to scratch a competitive itch that won’t go away.

But the second thing is that you want QBs who have unshakable confidence. What shows that more than trying to play two sports at a major collegiate level? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders are two of the highest-profile players to do that and that they both played at football powerhouses. You need major skill to play both, but you also need some swagger.

None of which says Brown is even going to get a chance to play football. He wasn’t a heralded prospect out of high school (3-star, 1558 overall) and he didn’t get any work last year. But considering what Florida has at the QB position thus far, I think it’s probably worth Napier and Company giving him a long, hard look.

Graham Mertz

Ever since it was announced that Mertz was transferring to Gainesville, I’ve had people asking what I think of him.

I certainly don’t ignore the tape when I’m trying to evaluate a QB, but what I’m looking for on the tape is whether the player is a reflection of his stats or whether something else is going on that is keeping his stats down. In Mertz’ case, I think it may be a little bit of both.

There’s no doubt that the Wisconsin offense over the past few years has been relatively uninventive. The QB spends a lot of time under center and last year was often in second or third-and-long situations because the Badgers running game wasn’t that good. But if we’re being honest, Mertz hasn’t been very good over the past three seasons either.

At this point, you likely know how much I believe high school completion percentage (particularly in their senior year) translates to the college game. Mertz completed just north of 62 percent of his throws both his junior and senior year of high school. That’s pretty good. He also averaged 10.2 yards per attempt and had 51 TDs to 0 INTs his senior year. That’s also pretty good.

Based on an analysis of QBs that I did when Florida flipped Jaden Rashada, I would have expected Mertz to turn into a star about 25 percent of the time.

Based on Mertz’ numbers at Wisconsin, that didn’t happen.

I know there are a lot of numbers on the above table, but I think it’s important to present them in full context. Mertz was a below-average QB all three years as a starter at Wisconsin. Whether you use my Yards Above Replacement (YAR) metric or whether you look at a more traditional metric like QB rating, he was below average.

In 2022, his YAR was 73rd out of 108 qualifying FBS QBs (those who averaged more than 14 throws per game). He was 63rd out of 108 in QB rating. For frame of reference, Anthony Richardson’s QB rating was only four points lower than Mertz’.

But I want you to zero in on the completion percentage. At its best, it was 61.1 percent in 2020 and has dropped every year until 2022. At this point, Mertz’ career completion percentage is 59.5 percent, or just slightly below what he showed in high school.

So even if we grant that Mertz will take a major step forward and approximate his high school completion percentage by switching from Wisconsin’s offense to Florida’s, you’re still looking at a very, very limited ceiling.

You can see this by just looking at what an improvement would need to look like to really move the needle. If I asked you coming into this season would you take 25 TDs and 5 INTs from Mertz but he was going to put up the exact same efficiency numbers (13 yards per completion, 59.3% completions) over around 300 throws, would you take it?

Those stats would result in a QB rating of 148.4. Florida had a QB in 2018 who threw 322 passes, completed 58.4 percent of them, had 24 TDs and 6 INTs, and a QB rating of 143.4. Feleipe Franks won ten games for the Gators that year, but I don’t think anyone would say that was a stable year at QB for the Gators.

So what if Mertz exceeds expectations, again with the 25 TDs and 5 INTs, but this time keeping his 13 yards per completion with a 62.3 percent completion percentage (his highest in high school). That would raise his QB rating to 154.7, which would have been top-25 in the country last season.

I would propose that kind of season is what we should expect would be the absolute ceiling for Mertz and would constitute a success. The problem is that Mertz gives nothing in the running game, and so if we project 41 carries for -7 yards (his average over three years at Wisconsin), his YAR drops to -0.21.

You may get above average production through the air, but when combined with his running ability, you end up just slightly below average.

Jack Miller

Gators fans seem to have soured on Miller after his performance in the bowl game, but given how Kyle Trask looked in 2020 against Oklahoma, we probably shouldn’t hold that against him too much. But that doesn’t mean we should expect to see a huge jump in production from Miller either, given what we’ve seen in college thus far.

I broke down Miller’s profile before the season last year, and he delivered about what we should have expected. In high school, Miller completed 56.7 percent of his passes, with his highest completion percentage topping out at 59.1 percent his senior year. In college thus far – albeit in limited (only 36) reps – he has completed 55.6 percent of his throws, completing 59.1 percent of his throws last season.

That suggests he’s probably topping out as a 60 percent thrower when he becomes comfortable in the offense given his track record in high school.

The good thing about Miller is that in his limited throws, he has been more efficient than Mertz, averaging more than 14 yards per completion thus far in college. This holds from high school as Miller averaged 16.9 yards per completion there compared to Mertz’ 14.9. We should expect him to be able to go down the field a little bit more.

What that means is we can do the same exercise regarding Miller’s ceiling that we did in the previous section with Mertz. Let’s assume great decision-making (25 TDs, 5 INTs) and that his 14 yards per completion carries through a full season. Then let’s assume he exceeds where I think he’ll land and completes 61 percent of his throws.

That profile suggests a ceiling of a QB rating of 157.2, which is very good but not quite elite. But Miller is also more mobile than Mertz, having averaged 6.0 yards per rush in high school on 234 carries and having averaged 0.7 yards per rush in college.

If we take that same 0.7 yards per rush average and spread it out over 41 carries like we did for Mertz, we get a YAR of 0.30, or an above average, functional QB. However, if we split the difference between his high school production and college production (3.3 yards per rush) over 41 carries, his YAR increases to 0.61.

That suggest that while Mertz’ ceiling is just slightly below average, Miller’s ceiling is above average, but not quite a star.

Max Brown

If you read the title, you’re likely not surprised that I’m high on Brown. It’s easy to see why when we look at his high school throwing stats.

It’s hard to complete 70 percent of your throws against air (just go watch Anthony Richardson’s combine performance). Brown did it two straight years while averaging 17.3 yards per completion, significantly higher numbers than either Mertz or Miller.

I don’t expect Brown to replicate a 70 percent completion rate in college. QBs who have that high of a percentage in high school almost always regress downward (even Joe Burrow, at least when you combine 2018 and 2019). But it does say something about where we should expect him to land.

In a scenario where he absolutely flops, we would expect a completion percentage of around 60 percent while averaging around 14 yards per completion. In this flop scenario, his decision-making is terrible (15 TDs, 20 INTs) but his other peripherals raise his QB rating to 133.7 (i.e. better than Mertz’ career QB rating at Wisconsin).

In a scenario where he plays average with a completion percentage of 62 percent, a TD:INT ratio of 20:12 and still averages 14 yard per completion, his QB rating would rise to 148.9.

And in a scenario where he plays well (67% completions, 14 yards per attempt, 25 TD:5 INT), his QB rating would be 170.0.

Because we have zero college tape to base any analysis on, the variance in Brown’s play could be huge. The upside to that is that his floor is likely close to where you would expect Mertz or Miller to end up, and you’ve learned whether he’s a long-term solution at the position along the way.

But there’s also more that tilts the statistics towards Brown’s direction. He averaged 7.1 yards per rush in high school on 327 carries. You wouldn’t expect him to ever average less than a yard per carry as a starter, which over 41 carries would put his YAR above average (0.21) even in his worst-case scenario.

But let’s say he can average 3.0 yards per carry. In his best-case throwing scenario, this puts his YAR at 1.28, or just edging into the elite (Bryce Young had  YAR of 1.24 last season).

Takeaway

I actually went into this exercise thinking that I was going to be making the case for Brown over Mertz but come away believing instead it should be Brown versus Miller.

Miller has the statistical profile to suggest that he could put up a very good season for the Gators. I just don’t see that same thing from Mertz. Some folks might point towards Bo Nix transferring to Oregon as a case study for how to make that happen. After all, Nix had a relatively poor high school completion percentage (57.8% for his career) that he replicated at Auburn (59.4%) and then jumping to 71.9% at Oregon.

I actually picked Oregon to make the playoff last year because I thought Nix would get better (not that much better) by getting out of the SEC. Mertz is coming into the lion’s den. Plus, Nix is way more mobile (5.7 yards per rush last year).

But if we’re squinting at one of the best transfers in recent memory as the only rationale for why to believe in a current transfer, that’s probably a bad sign.

And that’s where things really start to get interesting.

Napier has brought in both Mertz and Miller as transfers, and ostensibly has plans for one or both to be the starter. It probably doesn’t look great to the next potential transfer if they were to spend most of 2023 on the bench.

Combine that with the reality is that Billy Napier needs some wins in 2023. Another 6-7 season is not going to be received well within the fan base, and I’m not sure he is going to feel comfortable going with a redshirt freshman, especially opening the season in Salt Lake City.

But I just can’t help going back to the exercise that I laid out above. Even in what I would consider a worst-case scenario, Brown is going to be an above average QB. In a best-case scenario, we’re talking about him as an All-SEC caliber player. If you really want big-time wins and want to change the narrative, there’s no better way than getting All-SEC caliber play out of a QB.

Combine that with what I said about the moxie needed to try to play two sports and I wonder whether the safe pick isn’t the one we all think it is.