Austin Westlake coach Todd Dodge to retire after 2021 season

Photo by JR Flores

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Austin Westlake coach Todd Dodge will retire at the end of the 2021 season, the coach announced on Thursday.

Dodge is a six-time state championship head coach, leading Southlake Carroll to four titles in the 2000s before guiding Austin Westlake to back-to-back championships in 2019 and 2020, the last of which came against his son Riley Dodge’s Carroll squad. His half-dozen titles ranks fifth all-time among UIL 11-man Texas high school football coaches, and his 217 victories ranks 69th in state history.

Dodge will coach the 2021 season, his 23rd as a Texas high school football head coach, wherein his Westlake squad starts the year ranked No. 1 in the Dave Campbell’s Texas Football Class 6A rankings. Multiple sources indicate to Texas Football that Westlake defensive coordinator Tony Salazar is the favorite to succeed Dodge as the Chapparals’ head coach.

A record-setting quarterback at Port Arthur Jefferson, Dodge was the first Texas high school football quarterback to top 3,000 passing yards in a season, perhaps a harbinger of things to come in his coaching career, where his wide-open spread offense helped to revolutionize the game in Texas. From there, Dodge went on to Texas, where he battled with Bret Stafford for the starting quarterback job and ended up as the ninth all-time passer in Longhorns history.

His coaching career also includes a disappointing stint as the head coach at North Texas, where he went 6-37 in three-plus seasons at the helm of the Mean Green from 2007 to 2010.

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