Evaluating Florida 2026 QB commit Will Griffin
When Will Griffin committed to Florida on Saturday, I was excited but not overly so. After all, this is a guy ranked 89th in the 247Sports composite and he isn’t coming to campus until 2026. A lot can happen between now and then.
However, after taking a closer look I’m much more excited about this commitment. That is for two main reasons.
The first is that Griffin is from Tampa, Florida. These are the kids that Billy Napier – and any successful Florida head coach – has to get. Quarterbacks in the top-100 of the recruiting rankings are a fairly rare thing. There are only six QBs who fit that profile for this most recent 2024 recruiting class, and none of them were from Florida. That meant Florida had to go outside the state to bring in D.J. Lagway from Willis, TX.
Now, I’m certainly a fan of going to Texas for Lagway, but constantly going outside your own state to bring in talent is a waste of resources when you are the flagship school in a state as recruiting-rich as Florida. Griffin may be a sign that the tide is starting to turn in-state at Florida as the NIL organization finally finds its footing. If that’s true, then we’re about to see a major uptick in recruiting overall. And if that’s true, it’s going to coincide with Florida keeping players like Griffin at home.
But the second reason I’m more excited about this commitment than at first glance is that I looked at Griffin’s high school statistics.
The first thing you’ll notice is that I have stats included from 8th grade. That’s because Griffin was playing varsity football at Northside Christian. For context, Trinity Christian won that division in the 2021-2022 season and had a junior running back named Treyaun Webb.
He then took over as a starter in week five at Tampa Jesuit as a true freshman and then started all of last season. You can see the jump in both attempts and completion percentage, and that’s where I get excited. A true sophomore completing nearly 68 percent of his passes indicates that this is a guy who is starting to read defenses.
Of course, the one caveat to that is the 9.4 yards per attempt. That is a little bit low for an elite prospect (and I suspect part of why he’s top-100 rather than top-30). You don’t have to go too far to find a player with a similar high school profile and recruiting ranking (Jarrett Guarantano, Drew Lock and Ricky Town are decent comps) who struggled to put everything together at the college level. Of course, C.J. Stroud and Tua Tagovailoa also come pretty close to fitting the profile as well.
Griffin also has thrown a lot of INTs, but when you look at the film, you see why that is.
On this play, Griffin shows great pocket awareness by stepping up in the pocket to escape pressure rather than trying to escape directly to the outside. By stepping up, this allows him to get outside the pocket and deliver the throw. This is the kind of thing that prevents sacks and allows big plays to develop.
Griffin completely ignores his check-down (circled) as he looks for a place to throw the ball. Instead, he throws a dart to a streaking wide receiver down the sideline. That receiver has very little separation from the corner covering him and there is a safety coming over to the sideline to help. That means Griffin’s throw has to be perfect to execute the play. It is.
This kind of gunslinger mentality is going to lead to some interceptions. But it’s also going to lead to a lot of big plays. It’s important to remember though that when it comes to the statistics or film analysis, I’m comparing Griffin’s sophomore season to those other players’ senior seasons. That means this is still a player with significant room to grow for the next two seasons.
And that’s the point of this write-up and my enthusiasm. Because Griffin still has room to develop, Florida just got a commitment from a player from the state of Florida at the most important position on the field who has the potential to develop into an elite-level prospect.
That’s how you build a winning program.
2024 Florida Preview Magazine
The reaction to our release of the 2024 Read & Reaction Florida Preview Magazine has been overwhelming. For a while last week, the magazine was in the top-1000 books sold on Amazon and the #1 football book on the entire site.
If you liked this brief write-up and evaluation of Will Griffin, know that there is a much more detailed analysis of D.J. Lagway in the magazine that will let you know what I think of him as a prospect and how his high school stats and film project his performance at the next level.
Clyde Wiley
Thanks for providing your evaluation of Will Griffin. There are three other 2026 QB prospects in-state, a couple with ties to UF. It appears to be a rich year, maybe reaching way back comparable to 1992 with Thad Busby, Eric Kresser and Danny Wuerffel. As for Will, he not only has two more years of high school ball in a pass-heavy offense, the young man already has the grown man size at 6-3, 220 and likely stretches a bit taller by the time he arrives at UF. His dad is a UF alumnus and Will bleeds Gator Orange and Blue. This early commitment of such a QB portends well for building a strong recruiting class around Will. Finally, for as much yowling and howling by a slice of Gator fans that Billy Napier doesn’t know much about offense, isn’t it interesting that he’s snagged perceptively the best freshman quarterback in the country this year and has the pledge from Griffin, too? Something special is brewing in the Heavener Center. Here come the Gators!
GatorAuD
Fast article response time! Reading this on the beach during my honeymoon in the South of Portugal. Luckily my wife is also a UF alum 🙂
I Will read the physical magazine on the long flight back. Keep up the great work!
Tom
I wasn’t sold on him when he took over the starter role his freshman year. That starter he replaced as I recall, had only led Jesuit to a state title the year before. So that led me to suspect there was more happening here, than just a super talented freshman QB? The better teams he faced, he performed average to below average. You check out his spring video against defending state champ Lakeland. Jesuit was down 31-0 deep into the second half…..The Lakeland defense is in a rebuilding mode and still managed to keep Griffin under wraps until they began to substitute freely with backups……..