My Sister Shirley Could Call It: The Real Secret Behind Cracking A Predictable Offense

By Buddy Martin

GatorBaitMedia.com

Let’s get one thing straight before the compliance office starts sweating: Nobody is talking about stealing signs here. No trash cans, no drones, no guy in a hoodie with binoculars in the upper deck. What I’m talking about is something far more embarrassing for a coach to admit — getting figured out in broad daylight, on film, by people who did nothing more than watch enough tape and keep count.

That’s the dirty secret of play-calling in football. You don’t need espionage. You need patterns. And for four years in Gainesville, Billy Napier gave the whole conference plenty of patterns to count.

The Secret Isn’t Cheating — It’s Repetition

Every defensive coordinator in America builds the same weekly homework assignment: Pull every snap from an offense’s last several games, sort them by personnel grouping, down, distance, hash and formation and look for the plays that repeat when the math says they shouldn’t.

If a team runs the ball 66 percent of the time out of one specific set, that’s not a tendency anymore — that’s a tell. If the same route shows up on third-and-long enough times, a safety starts jumping it before the ball is snapped.

None of that requires stealing anything. It just requires an opponent who never varies the disguise.

That’s precisely what Miami defensive coordinator Lance Guidry admitted to doing before dismantling Florida 41-17 in the 2024 opener. Guidry told reporters the Hurricanes “took the top five to seven plays that showed up in every game last year — a reverse, the crossing routes, a tailback screen,” and that “within the first 10 plays, probably four or five of them showed up.”

That is about as close as a coordinator will ever come to a public confession: We knew exactly what was coming.

The Teams That Cracked the Code

Miami wasn’t alone, and it wasn’t a one-time thing.

Heading into 2024’s showdown with Texas A&M, Florida’s own athletics website admitted the Gators were “haunted by routine play-calling, running the ball out of the pistol on every first down” of the opening quarter of a 33-20 loss.

By February 2025, it wasn’t just Miami saying it out loud. Three anonymous SEC coaches told Athlon essentially the same thing about Napier’s offense in Florida’s “11” personnel: “Our safety called route trees pre-snap. They are predictable in that grouping… they weren’t hard to scheme for us in the passing game.”

Then 2025 happened, and it got worse before it got fixed.

USF — a team that had never beaten Florida — walked into the Swamp and won 18-16, with the media flatly noting “the next time Napier genuinely surprises a defense will be the first, still.”

Then came the rematch with Miami: 141 total yards, 0-for-13 on third down, the fewest yards for a Florida offense since 1999. Napier himself said afterward it was “not good enough.”

And this year, former Gator Jordan Odom removed all doubt about how it looked from inside the building, telling a podcast that Napier “would fold anytime we got into pressure situations… and we just became super predictable,” calling the offense “a bland waste of food” and adding, “If I’m a defensive coordinator watching our film, I could predict everything that was going to happen”

Napier was fired seven games into 2025 with a 22-23 record, the worst by any Florida coach since the 1940s.

Shirley, Doug Dickey and the Family Football IQ

Now, I’ve told this story on the podcast before, but it bears repeating for the youngsters: My sweet late sister Shirley had a football IQ of about a 2 — bless her heart, she thought a “nickel back” was spare change — and even she could call Doug Dickey’s plays before he called them.

That’s not really an insult to Shirley, a very smart lady. It’s an indictment of Dickey, who by his own admission after a crucial 1976 loss to Georgia said his staff “did a miserable job… I made some dumb calls” on a fourth-down gamble so predictable the Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville) paper ran the headline “Fourth and Dumb” the next morning.

Conservative, by the book, and easy to see coming — that was Dickey’s brand, decades before anybody called it “predictable playcalling” on a podcast.

Here’s the thing, though — decoding an opponent can be exhausting work on both sides of the headset. Even Steve Spurrier, the most creative offensive mind the SEC has ever produced, occasionally needed to hand the keys to somebody else.

Back in 2010, with South Carolina on the verge of history, Spurrier turned play-calling into what ESPN called a “community effort,” sharing duties with his staff. He did it again in 2014 after second-guessing himself early in the season, before deciding a year later he’d rather live with his own mistakes: “You make a bad call and you say, ‘Aw, dumbass, why did I do that?’ Maybe somebody else can do it better… but I plan to be the playcaller again. “

Even the Head Ball Coach needed a breather now and then. That’s how demanding this actually is — which makes it all the more inexcusable when a coach refuses to ever hand it off, the way Napier famously did in Gainesville, per multiple reports of his “stubborn refusal to give up offensive play calling duties.”

Enter Sumrall and Faulkner

So how do Jon Sumrall and Buster Faulkner avoid becoming the next punch line?

Start with the obvious structural fix: Sumrall is a defensive-minded head coach who has no interest in also being his own offensive coordinator. He hired Faulkner away from Georgia Tech specifically to own that job, calling him “one of the most innovative offensive coaches in football.”

That alone separates this regime from the last one — nobody at a headset is going to tell Faulkner “we’re not changing what we’re going to do for one gap,” the way Odom said Napier once did.

And Faulkner’s résumé backs up the hire. He was part of two national championship staffs at Georgia (2021, 2022) and one at Valdosta State (2007), spent three years building Georgia Tech into a top-12 national offense, and was named the 2025 FootballScoop Offensive Coordinator of the Year before Florida ever called. 247Sports labeled him “widely regarded as one of the top offensive coordinators in college football” at the time of the hire.

The antidote to predictability isn’t a trick play — it’s disguise: Multiple formations that produce the same handful of core concepts, and enough answers on third down that a safety can’t just call it out anymore.

That’s what a genuinely multiple offense buys you, and it’s the exact muscle Napier’s staff never built.

So Who’s Actually the Best Play-Caller in the Country?

Depends who you ask, and everybody’s got a favorite.

On3’s Coach Dan Casey put Texas’s Steve Sarkisian at No. 1 this offseason -- we’ll see about that this season — followed by Kentucky’s Will Stein, Vanderbilt’s Tim Beck, LSU’s Charlie Weis Jr. and Navy’s Drew Cronic, with Lincoln Riley an honorable mention.

Down in Athens, quarterback Gunner Stockton will tell you it’s his own coordinator, Mike Bobo, hands down — yet every day we hear a segment of Dawg fans calling for his head.

My take, for what it’s worth after decades of watching this sport from the press box: There’s no wrong answer among that group, because they share the one trait Napier’s Florida never had — they change the picture enough that a defense can’t just count snaps and know what’s next.

If Faulkner meets expectations in Gainesville, anything close to what he did at Georgia Tech, don’t be surprised if his name is on that list a year from now.

Shirley would’ve liked that. She never did enjoy calling plays that already got called for her.