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Why citing D.J. Lagway’s completion percentage is a losing argument

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I got involved in a bit of a Twitter tiff on Friday with Chris Marler, a writer for LouisianaSports.net, because I responded to an articles that he wrote calling Gators sophomore QB D.J. Lagway “the most overrated player in America”.

2024 SEC play:
QB 1: 54%, 6 TD, 5 INT, 142.8 QB rating, 9.4 yds/att
QB 2: 60%, 13 TD, 8 INT, 127.7 QB rating, 7.1 yds/att

QB1 is Lagway
QB2 is Nussmeier

More here for those interested: https://t.co/tgS5ZNUMcI https://t.co/jA9JM5ZbfU

— Will Miles (@WillMilesSEC) July 10, 2025

He took umbrage to me linking my Lagway evaluation article from a few weeks ago as a rebuttal to his overrated claims after showing Lagway’s SEC stats vs. LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier’s. My point was that his evaluation was citing stats that 1) aren’t great for projecting what will happen in the future and 2) are a flawed analysis of QB play regardless of whether you’re using it for projection or not.

Here’s the direct quote from the article that caused me to respond: “Against SEC teams, Lagway had just one game where he completed over 53 percent of his passes. He also had a touchdown to interception ratio of 6:6.”

First, I think it’s important to be correct here. Lagway did not have a 6:6 TD:INT ratio in SEC play. He played against Texas A&M (1 TD, 2 INT), Mississippi State (0,0), Tennessee (1,1), Kentucky (0,1), Georgia (1,0), LSU (1,0) and Ole Miss (2,1). For those who are counting, that’s six touchdowns and five interceptions.

Does one INT really make that big of a difference? It does when you only have 100 attempts in SEC play. And if you’re going to focus on his 5% interception rate, then you have to also credit the guy for his 6% TD rate. After all, the best QB in the conference – Ole Miss’ Jaxson Dart – had a TD rate of 5.3% against SEC opponents (13 TD in 244 attempts).

But let’s go back to the INT rate. There’s no doubt that 5% is too high. But this is where watching film becomes important.

Lagway’s first interception against Texas A&M was an end-of-half Hail Mary into the end zone. His second interception against A&M was because his receiver fell down. His interception against Kentucky was a miscommunication as he threw down the seam while his receiver broke to the corner. His interception against Ole Miss was slightly high but hit his receiver’s hands. He earned the interception against Tennessee; that one was just bad.

The point isn’t really to defend these particular throws. I’ll be the first to admit that Lagway put the ball into dangerous spots too much in 2024. Instead, it’s to suggest that in a 100 throw sample size, I only see two INTs where he made the wrong read. Long-term, that’s where interceptions are going to come from, and is why I have confidence Lagway will show significant improvement protecting the ball in 2025.

Despite some of those caveats, I actually do think the criticism of Lagway’s interceptions is appropriate. But the thing that drives me nuts about the narratives around Lagway is that they often use statistics dishonestly. For example, it is absolutely true that Lagway only had one SEC game where he had a completion percentage above 53 percent. But it is also completely misleading.

Let’s look at the most egregious example of why. Against Kentucky, Lagway completed 50 percent of his throws (7/14) and his TD:INT ratio was 0:1. That’s terrible, right?

Well….no, he was actually unbelievably good in that game. That’s because he threw for 259 yards (an absurd average of 18.5 yards per attempt) that included a 50-yard bomb to Elijhah Badger that led to a Jadan Baugh 7-yard TD run, a 58-yard shot to Badger that led to a 10-yard Baugh TD run, a 44-yard strike to Chimere Dike that led to a 1-yard Baugh run,  and a 40-yard throw to Badger that led to a 1-yard Baugh run.

Baugh had 5 TDs in the game, but Lagway was the reason that he was down there all the time.

Or how about against LSU? In that game, Lagway only completed 50 percent of his throws again (13-26) and had 1 TD to 0 INT. Not all that great, right?

Again, those stats leave out key context. That context is that Lagway threw for 226 yards on those 26 throws (8.7 yards per attempt). The Gators scored on a 23-yard back-shoulder explosive from Lagway to Badger to open the scoring. They scored the go-ahead fourth quarter TD on a one-yard Ja’Kobi Jackson run after Lagway hit Badger for a 36-yard explosive to get the ball to the one. And perhaps most importantly, Baugh hit the 55-yard backbreaking run after Lagway hit Hayden Hansen for a 19-yard first down on the play prior to bleed the clock and force LSU to get aggressive against the run.

Completion percentage actually isn’t a bad stat to compare most QBs, but that’s because most QBs have relatively similar success rates as they push the ball down the field. That isn’t even remotely true of Lagway, as he averaged 19.2 yards per attempt on throws traveling more than 20 yards downfield last year. For comparison, LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier and Georgia’s Carson Beck averaged 11.5 and 9.6 yards per attempt on those types of throws, respectively.

Those guys need high completion percentages to be effective because they are fundamentally not very effective downfield. Lagway is the complete opposite, as he is deadly at 20-plus yards while struggling underneath.

This is an incredibly important distinction when trying to understand whether Lagway played well despite his low completion percentages (overall and in SEC play). And my reason for making that distinction becomes clear when we look at the correlation of yards per play to scoring points.

The data in this chart is from 2025, but I’ve done this analysis multiple times for different combinations of years. The story is always the same: yards per play has a very high correlation (71% in this case) to scoring points, much higher than any other variable (red zone efficiency, completion percentage, third down conversion percentage, etc.).

In his article, Marler stated that the Gators “offense ranked 64th or worse in every major offensive category: total offense, rushing offense, passing offense, and scoring offense,” as a reason that Lagway was overrated. Again, these statistics are true but misleading.

The Gators offense averaged 5.9 yards per play with Graham Mertz under center. This would have ranked 41st in country against FBS opponents. It was a putrid offense with Aidan Warner at the helm (4.2 yards per play). But the Gators averaged 6.7 yards per play with Lagway at QB, which would have ranked 5th in the country. The Gators offense also had a 9.1 percent explosive (20-plus yard play) rate with Lagway under center compared to 2.9 percent with Warner and 6.5 percent with Mertz.

This means that Lagway piloted a top-5 offense as a true freshman. Even if Lagway doesn’t improve at all, that means we should project him to be in the top-3 QBs in the conference, which is right around where most publications have him (both Lindy’s and Athlon have him at 4th). So perhaps we should call him properly rated?

But the hype for something more than that is legitimate as well. We’re talking about a kid who completed well above 70 percent of his throws as a senior in high school. That sort of performance almost always correlates to somewhere in the 64-67 percent range at the college level long-term.

If he does that, nobody will be calling him overrated. They’ll be calling him the winner of the Heisman Trophy.