Justin Buzzard is 47 years old, he pastors a church in the Bay Area, and I have not been this happy about a two-snap defensive substitution in my entire life.
With 5:21 left in a 41-21 loss to College of the Redwoods on August 29th, Yahoo Sports reported San Jose City College sent the 47-year-old pastor playing defensive end into the game. He got into a three-point stance, engaged the left tackle, and helped spring linebacker Kyler Headley for a sack assist on his first live snap. Then, once the whistle blew, he found the quarterback and gave him one more shove for the road.
I confess I assumed this was one of those “grandpa suits up for a single snap as a stunt” stories. It is not. RELEVANT reported that Buzzard’s older son showed him an Instagram video of a man in his 60s playing college ball on the East Coast, and Buzzard’s reaction was to call a coach at San Jose City and ask for a shot. He got one. He made the roster as a defensive end, third on the depth chart, second-string special teams, and by a wide margin the oldest guy on the roster.
Third string. In a blowout loss.
That’s not a footnote, it’s the whole story working the way it should. Buzzard played D-III football at Whitworth University until a finger injury ended it about thirty years ago, and he’s apparently spent the decades since running, lifting, and doing Krav Maga like a man settling a score with his own tendons. Punter Preston Conrad, presumably the team’s foremost authority on squats, put it best: “I gotta give him props. His squat depth is insane.” I don’t know what that has to do with pastoring, but I believe every word of it.
Bleacher Report had the clip up within the hour.
https://twitter.com/BleacherReport/status/2094788410749907316
Watch it and you’ll notice nobody on that sideline treats this like a novelty act. Head coach Jim Winkler’s quote is the one that got me: “To me, when he’s on the field… there’s no difference. He’s just one of 105 guys.” A locker room full of 18-year-olds absorbed a pastor more than twice their age into the rotation without turning it into a bit, and Buzzard admits he wondered how they’d handle it. By his own account, nobody’s going easy on him, and he’s not going easy on them either.
The record book will remember this game as a 20-point loss and nothing else. Two snaps total, one of them a kneel-down, isn’t a career, and if you’re grading this on pure football value, it’s garbage time on a team that got run off its own field. But Bleacher Report noted his actual goal is to finish the whole season, and a guy who waited thirty years for two snaps isn’t losing sleep over a blowout in August.
Buzzard’s own framing is the one I keep coming back to: “Risk or rust. You’re either risking or you’re rusting as a man.” Married 23 years, college-age kids, a congregation depending on him, and he chose the defensive line anyway.
Stick around for the rest of this college football season and try to find a depth-chart footnote that’s made you feel anything close to this.
He turns 48 in a few months. Somebody get this man more than two snaps.
