Has DJ Uiagalelei finally found his fit at Florida State?

Uiagalelei: “Hi, Ms. Carol.”

Defensive lineman KJ Sampson: “How are you, Ms. Carol?”

Punter Alex Mastromanno: “Ms. Carol!”

Mike Norvell: “GOOOOOOD MORNING, MS. CAROL!”

Florida State’s head coach sprints by, and he’s swift and boisterous enough that his greeting reaches full Doppler effect. That’s what Uiagalelei first really loved about Norvell when he signed on as a Seminole in January. This energy that spills over into mania.

“How intense he is,” Uiagalelei says. “Screaming all around the facility, yelling ‘Good morning!’ 24/7. It’ll be 8 o’clock at night and he’s yelling ‘Good morning.'”

Ms. Carol also appreciates Norvell’s exuberance — she returns his well-wishes with just as many “o’s” in her ‘good morning’ as Norvell managed to belt out — and she appreciates Uiagalelei too.

She nods in the quarterback’s direction. “I’d really thought I’d seen it and heard it all,” she says. “You know, 25 years with Coach Bowden. Eight years with Jimbo. He is something different. It’s wonderful.”

Uiagalelei has caught on fast in Tallahassee.

His new coaches and teammates will tell you he’s something different too. So will his old teammates and coaches. Even as the noise around him these past few years swelled from adulation to aspersion to apathy, what was different about DJ Uiagalelei — the absurd things he could make a football do — was “jaw-dropping,” “nuts,” borderline Bunyanesque.

He can throw a football more than three-quarters of the way downfield with a flick of his wrist, or so says Colby Bowman, his former high school receiver: “He could do a three-step drop and then launch that thing 80, 85 yards.”

Back in his high school days at St. John Bosco in Bellflower, California, his former quarterback coach Steven Lo was catching for Uiagalelei during warmup, and Uiagalelei literally broke his hand. “The ball blew my bone apart. It felt like someone shot my hand,” Lo says. “I don’t even know if his throw was fully gassed up, but it had that much velocity. A normal human being like myself should not be catching footballs from him. You need talented receivers with real hands to catch that kind of heat.”

Florida State’s fifth-year senior, Ja’Khi Douglas, a talented receiver trained to catch said heat, corroborates: “Every pair of gloves: rip, rip, rip. Like, dang. I gotta get a new pair of gloves after every practice, because DJ rips them.”

Uiagalelei has long been tantalizing. But for the bulk of his collegiate career, the temptation of what he could be bumped against the ceiling of what he became. For two years as a starter at Clemson: embattled, felled by a rocky fit between scheme and player for one of the preeminent programs in college football. In one season at Oregon State: rejuvenated, buoyed by a better fit and improved play, but blunted by a modest platform in Corvallis. What he hopes he finds in Tallahassee — what he and those around him think he has found here — is a blissful marriage of the best parts of what came before. The right fit on the right stage.

“I think he can go and be as good as there is,” Norvell said.

In other words, now on the stage he was once called to command, he can — maybe, finally — be as good as he once billed to be.

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The story of Uiagalelei’s tenure as college quarterback has gone from mythical to cautionary to a nebulous in-between. Depending on your vantage point, he’s either in limbo or on a precipice.

“I didn’t think I would be here, at Florida State,” he says, nestled in the team’s quarterbacks room — as much as a man who is 6-foot-4 and weighs about 250 pounds can nestle. Over his shoulder, images of former Seminole luminaries stand guard. “I didn’t think I’d transfer twice or be at three different schools in my college career or be in college for five years. I thought it was gonna be three-and-out, straight outta Clemson, to the league.”

In the heady days of 2020, Uiagalelei walked onto Clemson’s campus as one of the top quarterback recruits in the country. He made a pair of starts for Trevor Lawrence when Lawrence was sidelined by COVID-19, then he casually engineered the largest comeback in Death Valley history against Boston College and threw for the most yards by an opponent at Notre Dame Stadium.

Mostly, he spent the first few months of his fledgling college career looking like a lock to be Lawrence’s heir apparent. As the star quarterback at Clemson. As the face of college football in the national discourse too.

Then suddenly — and irretrievably — he flatlined. There was the stalled development: 10 interceptions to nine touchdown passes in 2021; an auspicious start in 2022 derailed by eight turnovers in his last six games. The sputtering offenses he spearheaded: Clemson ranked No. 93 in the FBS in pass completions of 20 yards or more in the two years Uiagalelei started. The inglorious benching(s) for Cade Klubnik, another five-star recruit waiting in the wings: First, against Syracuse in 2022; again briefly at Notre Dame; once more, and for the final time, in the ACC championship against North Carolina. That he needed a reset at all came as a shock to his system. Like something foreign had entered his body and he needed to expel it.

He explains: “High school’s great, top player in the country, five-star everything. There was no adversity until my sophomore year came around. That was the first time I actually experienced some type of adversity in anything.”

Uiagalelei is, according to everyone around him, a humble man. Someone happy to cede the spotlight and its attendant applause. Heading into his senior year at St. John Bosco, he bowed out of the Elite 11 — where high school quarterback royalty flocks to see and be seen — when his team was putting in a lackluster training camp. He wanted to stay local to help right the ship instead.

But he’s honest too. It wasn’t that football, or sports, or excelling in them, was easy. But he had always been able to make it look that way.

Back when Uiagalelei was in grade school, he played baseball too. He was about 10 years old and dominating in little league ball when his mother, Tausha, recalls him stalking off the field, fed up with a game he didn’t think his team should’ve lost. “I’m not here to have fun anymore,” he declared. “I want to win. Put me in travel ball.” Tausha remembers thinking to herself, Oh, this guy’s different.

His private coach in those days was Dave Coggin, a former Clemson quarterback commitment and onetime MLB pitcher. Coggin would host college coaches looking to scout the Southern California baseball talent from time to time, and as a favor to Uiagalelei’s father, he let DJ, then just a middle schooler, join 40 or 50 high schoolers showing off their stuff. UCLA was in the house. Vanderbilt. Clemson. Dozens of others.

“He was up there throwing at 85, 86. It was wild,” Coggin says. “I tell ya, I had more questions from all the colleges about, ‘Who’s this kid?’ than all those other juniors and seniors.”

This, in the sport Uiagalelei ultimately decided he didn’t want to pursue. Though Coggin points out that the Dodgers took a flier on Uiagalelei, who hasn’t played baseball since high school, in the 20th round of the 2023 MLB draft. “And I don’t think that’s the last that he’s gonna hear from a major league team, to be honest.” Point being: Up until the moment he was not, Uiagalelei had only really known life as a sensation. As a pitcher, sure. As a quarterback, most definitely.

With this kernel of self-affirmation as his soundtrack — he could do this; he knew how to be the best player in any room, on any field — Uiagalelei entered the transfer portal and knocked on new doors.

At Oregon State, a fresh playbook felt like relief, and the vote of confidence from head coach Jonathan Smith, felt like redemption. “It’s all you want as a player,” explains Uiagalelei, who has said in the past that was something he didn’t feel he had by the end of his stint in Clemson. “Especially as a quarterback. You want the coaching staff to believe in you, trust you to be able to go out there and perform.” (Dabo Swinney, for his part, has said he considers Uiagalelei’s time at Clemson a success, and foresees yet more success for the quarterback: “I love DJ. … I’m pulling for him to do great things,” he said in 2023. “I’ll be very surprised if he doesn’t.”)

Then, on the heels of a heartening one-year showing in Corvallis — he finished No. 12 in QBR, after checking in at 97 and 52 in his two years starting at Clemson — with the Pac-12 in a death spiral, Smith departed for Michigan State. And Uiagalelei chose to start over again too. He entered the transfer portal, and within the hour, Norvell rang Uiagalelei’s phone. Some 24 hours after that, Tony Tokarz, Florida State’s quarterbacks coach, touched down in Oregon to meet with Uiagalelei. The clamor for Uiagalelei’s services was more subdued than it was five years ago. Back then, he carpooled to high school every day with one of his football coaches, and there would be days where the two wouldn’t speak for the entirety of the hour-long commute. There was no time, in between the flurry of calls Uiagalelei fielded from college coaches intent on wooing him to their campus and, one time, serenading him for his birthday.

But then, he didn’t need to be won over. He needed a win. He was looking for a second second chance.

Uiagalelei liked the idea of joining ranks with Norvell, who has fashioned himself into something of a transfer portal savant. This April, eight of Norvell’s portal acquisitions were drafted; three were selected in the first 40 picks. He liked the way his deep balls could match with the speed at receiver that eventually joined him in Tallahassee (Alabama transfer Malik Benson; LSU transfer Jalen Brown). He liked that, when Tokarz joined him in Corvallis and they pored over five of his Oregon State game tapes, Tokarz pointed out what he liked about Uiagalelei’s game, and what he thought he could make better. He liked, he liked, he liked.

Now, the early returns seem rosy. Either by dint of personal experience in the art of starting over, or by sheer force of goodwill, Uiagalelei has, by all accounts, managed to convert this Florida State team into Uiagalelei acolytes.

For the other quarterbacks in the room, hibachi dinners in town and rounds of golf helped. So did the deep ball he launched 70, 72 yards in the air one day this spring. “That’s when I thought, ‘Yeah, he’s gonna do just fine here,'” says Luke Kromenhoek, Florida State’s freshman passer.

For his new group of receivers, a four-day trip back to Uiagalelei’s hometown in California did the trick. As did the back-foot toss he threw to Douglas this fall camp that was this much out of bounds, right where only Douglas, and not the defender draped over him, could catch it. “Man, that dude is special,” Douglas said.

For his quarterbacks coach, it was spying Uiagalelei in the meeting room with the film projector on, no meetings on the docket or teammates in sight. Tokarz had been on the road recruiting for days and thought the solo study session was a one-off. Then the next day, he spotted Uiagalelei again. The day after that one too. There was also the ball he threw to Kentron Poitier in spring ball that Tokarz says had all the makings of a “Sunday-type throw.” “All the coaches are kinda looking at each other through the side of their eye, saying, ‘Did you just see that?'”

In other words, Uiagalelei has flashed enough in his time with the Seminoles to allow them to dream about what might be possible. Him too.

“A lotta guys probably would’ve quit or tried to find something else to do in life,” says Beaux Collins, who played with Uiagalelei in his Clemson days and stood on the sideline with him as crowds chanted for the backup. “But he’s still chasing that dream that he has.”

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The joke among St. John Bosco coaches was that Uiagalelei, all of 16 years old at the time, looked like a parent who just dropped his kid off at the middle school next door. He had a goatee and he made defensive linemen look dainty (the first time Paul Diaz, Bosco’s defensive line coach, saw Uiagalelei in person, he assumed he was a lineman).

As he wends his way toward practice, past Ms. Carol, through the iron gate, surrounded by a gaggle of younger quarterbacks who, once again, look like they could be his kids, Uiagalelei still has the Mature Adult thing going for him.

He lives in a house 20 minutes outside of campus with his fiancée, Ava Pritchard. His college exploits, to date, have mostly consisted of befriending his neighbor, Mark, “an older gentleman.” (“Like a dad,” Uiagalelei clarifies. “He’s not old. Just older than me.”) When he and Pritchard settled on Tallahassee as their next stop, this house and this neighborhood appealed to them precisely because it was removed from school, from football, from commotion.

“I’m an older guy,” Uiagalelei shrugs. “I didn’t want to live near a bunch of college kids.”

He could point you to some landmarks on campus. He’s even given drive-by tours to visiting family but confesses he has yet to walk around Florida State like a true student. This place is, in the best of scenarios, the launching pad to somewhere new, something bigger. And still, this place is also where he’s looked and felt most like the DJ Uiagalelei he used to be.

“They let him go be DJ,” Tausha says. “He’s like high school DJ,” she goes on. When football was shiny and exciting and unsullied. “There he is. That’s DJ. There he is. We knew he was in there.”

Pritchard confirms as much. Uiagalelei met his future fiancée two university stops ago, on a campus bus at Clemson. He’d been in South Carolina for only a week or so and he was lost. He spotted Pritchard, complimented her shoes (black Yeezys, she recalls), then asked her how to get to class. They went on a date a few days later, and they’ve been together since, from one coast to another.

“You can just tell in his voice,” she says. “It’s just different here.”

Uiagalelei thinks it’s different here. Everyone around him does too. They figure it has to be, for what Uiagalelei has in mind. “This is NFL or bust,” says Terry Bullock, who coached him at Bosco and knew him long before that.

And if it is different here — if Florida State makes him different; if this really is the right partner with the right platform — that work starts in earnest now. For him, and for his 10th-ranked Seminoles, Georgia Tech and the 2024 season are one day away.

Back on the field, as practice gets in full swing, Uiagalelei takes a snap, launches. Norvell likes what he sees, and he (surprise!) positively bellows his approval.

“That’s the angle we need! GOOOOOOD THROW!”

Perhaps Norvell will like what he’ll see next week too, and the weeks and months after that. Maybe Uiagalelei will too.

He takes another snap. The speakers blare a Logic song overhead, and it’s a fitting soundtrack for this chapter in Tallahassee, Uiagalelei’s coda.

I got a lot on my mind.

Got a lot of work ahead of me.

There is not much time left, but there is much left for Uiagalelei to do. He is not here to have fun anymore. His season, and his second second chance, awaits.