Florida Gators offense is the most explosive in college football, and it’s rooted on one key element
The offense for the Florida Gators is explosive, but Buster Faulkner isn’t reinventing the wheel; he’s crushing teams with flare and basics.
The most exciting thing about the Florida Gators so far this season has been the offense. Under Billy Napier last year, they scored just 29 touchdowns, and through four games, head coach Jon Sumrall’s Gators have already gotten 29 of them.
Why have they elevated so much? Simple: offensive coordinator Buster Faulkner.
After a long road as an offensive coordinator that’s taken him from Southern Miss to Georgia Tech before landing in Gainesville, Faulkner is having a fantastic start to his tenure. One thing that has stood out isn’t the explosiveness or the points scored: it’s the design.
Buster Faulkner’s secret sauce on offense is simple
When you look at how the Gators play, it’s a lot of smoke and mirrors. Faulkner does a lot of motion with different personnel packages. It’s not as much about having crazy concepts, but rather the package that it comes in. They change that weekly, but they run the same concepts.
“Formationally, motions, shifts, you know, those are the things that, you know, we don’t change a lot of concepts on a week in, week out basis, but we do change the pictures,” Faulkner said during his press conference this week.
You can see it during the games. The razzle-dazzle that comes off pre-snap is a really nice package, and it can confuse the defense. Minnesota Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell calls it the “Illusion of Complexity” and Faulkner has mastered it.
This is a fun way to get to a split-zone run. They flip the strong side pre-snap, then send wide receiver Bailey Stockton on jet motion before tight end Amir Jackson crosses the formation to finish off the split-flow, launching running back Jadan Baugh for a big gain. This play has been ran by just about every offense in some capacity, with the only requirement is a player on the run side kick over to the other side at the snap. You don’t even need to have motion to make it work.
He also finds different ways to use simple concepts to his advantage, with this simple bootleg arrow route into the flat being a key concept that he likes to use, from a lot of different formations and looks.
On occasion, Faulkner will pull out some crazy stuff with some cool schematic elements, including nearly launching Vernell Brown III on a fake screen, shuck-and-go for a touchdown, but Aaron Philo just missed him.
The window dressing makes Faulkner’s offense so hard to prepare for and deal with on a snap-by-snap basis, but his concepts are often simple, and he does a great job slamming it down the defense’s throat.
The little things make a big difference.
