The Looming Brilliance of Buster Faulkner: “If It Works Once, We Retire It”
Inside the Mind of Florida’s New Offensive Ringmaster
By Buddy Martin
The more I listen to Buster Faulkner, the more I watch how he carries himself and the more I think about how smart this guy is, the clearer it gets: he’s going to be a head coach, and soon.
I hope not too soon. Give it a couple of years, because he has a quarterback he could win multiple championships with. But you never know what happens when somebody waves the long green in front of a man’s nose.
I love the way Faulkner thinks. The creative right side of his brain comes up with the complicated formations.
The organized left side keeps it all in order. Add the pre-snap motions, and a linebacker or safety feels like he’s standing in the middle of the interstate with traffic coming at him from both directions.
His plays have a short expiration date and don’t last long. “There’s a joke in the office that if it works one time, we retire it,” Faulkner said Tuesday. You get the idea. You can’t steal his playbook because it’s all in his head.
Then there’s the magic touch: the right play at exactly the right moment. Take the trick play that was so huge against Auburn when Florida featured Kahleil Jackson passing to Amir Jackson.
Since it was Jackson-to-Jackson, the play was nicknamed “Uncle Jack.”
You might say he doubled down on “JACK.”
Faulkner does something to defensive coordinators that’s worse than sleep apnea. He haunts them with bad dreams that keep them up all night.
For Gator fans, it’s a blast watching him run a scheme or game, moving players around like chess pieces. Or sometimes just making it up as he goes along.
Florida ran for 300 yards and has had 50-plus rushing attempts two games in a row. Buster says that wasn’t the plan. It happened because they could.
“Anytime you hit 300, you got a good chance to win,” he said. He wants an offense that can “beat you in really any facet.”
Right now, the ground game is the one beating people. The running game drives everything. Faulkner’s volume, motions and shifts get attention, but the core is five or six run plays in different packaging. He can afford to be creative because Florida can run it 50 times.
The experts out in the desert are starting to look at Faulkner’s offense like it’s some serious new horsepower under the hood, carefully harnessed by Jon Sumrall to make sure these boys don't suffer from any emotional letdowns.
For Saturday’s late-afternoon showdown in Columbia, Vegas opened Florida as a cool 5- to 5.5-point road favorite. The moneyline is hovering around -215, with the total over/under sitting at a lively 56.5 points.
The math guys and their fancy computers are completely smitten with this system. We’re talking about an offense that enters Week 5 sitting pretty at No. 1 in the country in EPA/Pass and No. 5 in EPA/Rush. With Jadan Baugh churning out real estate down on the ground at a 150-yards-per-game clip, Faulkner has a security blanket that makes life mighty easy for young Aaron Philo.
The ESPN Football Power Index is leaning heavily into a Gator victory, slapping a 70.2% win probability on the game, while the smart models predict a comfortable 31-25 final.
You always worry a bit about a “letdown factor” after an emotional afternoon like the one we just witnessed against Ole Miss. Going on the road in the SEC as a ranked favorite is never a walk in the park. But if Philo simply goes out there and keeps his composure, Sumrall's disciplined hand should keep this engine firing on all cylinders.
I’ll be honest. This Buster guy could turn out to be brilliant. Maybe even Steve Spurrier brilliant. But I’d never put him above the Head Ball Coach, or even in the same paragraph. Faulkner has to earn that.
Remember, Spurrier changed the entire SEC from a running conference to a passing conference.
Still, before he’s done, Faulkner is going to leave a big mark on the Florida Gators, and maybe on the SEC.
And that’s a fact, Uncle Jack!
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