Texas high school football coaches tend to be creatures of habit, rhythm, routine. Practices follow a familiar script. Weeks hum along to the beat. Most coaches have their own pre-game rituals, whether it involves music or silence or a Snickers bar.

In other words, coaches crave consistency. And that’s why 2020 will represent perhaps their biggest challenge.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: we don’t know what football season will look like, but we know it will be different. Maybe the season is delayed. Maybe the season is truncated. Maybe the season is postponed. Maybe the season is canceled. We don’t know — and even when we do know, it’s likely to be a fluid situation.

That puts coaches in a unique and largely unprecedented situation of having to manage players through the unknown. For people who usually operate with regimented consistency, the 2020 season is likely to offer none.

Let’s take a hypothetical situation as an example: the Tigers are getting ready for their big game Friday night against the rival Wildcats. But the Tigers’ star quarterback just found out that his brother tested positive for COVID-19 on Sunday. The standard operating procedure (as much as that exists) is for the quarterback to be tested and isolate until his test results come back. The Tigers’ coach spends the week preparing his sophomore backup quarterback for the big game…only to learn on Thursday that the star quarterback tested negative. Who starts the game on Friday?

But those on-field decisions pale in comparison to the off-field dilemmas into which coaches are bound to be thrust.

The great myth of high school football coaches is that their job is mostly X’s and O’s. Yes, calling plays on Friday night is part of the job description, but it accounts for about 2 percent of the gig. Coaches are teachers, counselors, motivational speakers, disciplinarians, comforters, consultants, mentors, managers, confidantes and father figures, plus about fifty other things.

And the virus and its ripple effects test every one of those responsibilities. Sad as it is to say, it’s a statistical inevitability that Texas high school football players will lose a loved ones due to the pandemic; others will get sick themselves and be forced to be separated from their team; others still will see their team forfeit games because of a local outbreak.

It’ll be on the coaches not only to prepare their players for the unknown, but to be there for them when the unknown strikes.

That’s not to mention the unfortunate but real possibility that football doesn’t happen in the fall. Imagine the heartbreaking conversation coaches may have to have with their players that the pads will stay shelved for the season.

Of course, this is nothing new: coaches have always been more than just guys with a whistle, though this year will provide a more robust challenge. Coaches have already proven themselves up to the task — when spring practices and summer workouts were canceled, staffs were nimble enough to move entirely online. Most Texas high school football coaches essentially have a Master’s degree in Zoom at this point.

The 2020 season represents an unprecedented and daunting challenge. But few are better equipped to tackle it than Texas high school football coaches.