Never in the history of college football has a head coach faced a fuller plate than today.

The job has always demanded long hours, relentless recruiting, and the pressure to win, but the role has been redefined in just the past five years. 

Even coaches who took over programs earlier this decade are operating in a vastly different world. The transfer portal, NIL, and revenue sharing haven’t just added to the workload; they’ve fundamentally changed what it means to be a head coach. 

Today’s coaches are part CEO, part general manager, part fundraiser and, somewhere between those responsibilities, are still expected to coach football. Because of that, it is no wonder that more head coaches are relinquishing play-calling duties to focus more on the program and less on the game plan. 

“I kind of say I’m the coordinator of culture at Texas Tech because I let my coordinators do their job,” Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire said at the recent THSCA Coaching Convention in Houston. “In the Power Four and in the NFL, it’s really hard if you’re the play-caller and the head coach. My position being the CEO and being more of a game manager on Saturdays really fits us at Texas Tech.”

The last play-calling head coach to win a national championship was Jimbo Fisher in 2014. Only four play-calling head coaches – Fisher, Pete Carroll, Steve Spurrier, and Tom Osborne – have won national championships since 1990. Ryan Day gave up play-calling at Ohio State in 2024 and won a national championship that same season. Lane Kiffin no longer calls plays. New Kentucky head coach Will Stein, considered one of the top offensive coordinators in college football over the last five years, is not calling plays for the Wildcats. 

But FBS head coaches in Texas buck that trend. Eight of the 13 head coaches in Texas call their own plays on one side of the ball or the other. That number was nine in 2025 before Baylor head coach Dave Aranda relinquished defensive play-calling responsibilities this offseason. 

UTEP head coach Scotty Walden gave up play-calling towards the end of the 2025 season in hopes of jump-starting the Miners offense. He says the biggest advantage to calling plays is that he can control the tempo of the game from the sideline. He says the biggest disadvantage is the time constraints. Walden, who is still a young coach, wanted to get a different view of his program and said that ceding play-calling freed him up to take a complete diagnosis of what was ailing his Miners. 

“I got to be the CEO and the advantage there is that I could go around and see the different parts of my program that had holes in it,” Walden said, though, he indicated that his plan in 2026 is to retake the play-calling responsibilities on offense. “It allowed me to take a step back and it was a huge advantage for me.”

Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian is one of the head coaches who still calls plays. He earned the job with the Longhorns because of his play-calling prowess at Alabama, leading the Crimson Tide to a national championship in 2020. His play-calling responsibilities became a hot button topic during a disappointing 2025 season, especially after the road loss to Florida. 

Sarkisian says it is the only way he knows how to be a head coach. He cut his teeth under Carroll, one of the only four head coaches to win a national championship as the primary play-caller on one side of the ball. Norv Turner was the head coach of the Oakland Raiders when a young Sarkisian dipped his toe in the NFL coaching waters for the first time. 

“This is just the way I learned it and the way I grew up in the profession,” Sarkisian said. “Obviously, there are lots of ways to be a head coach, and there’s a lot of successful ways to do it. But this is just the way that I learned how to do it and I feel like we manage it well.” 

Another thing that Sarkisian and the other play-calling head coaches emphasized was the importance of trusting the coordinator on the other side of the ball. If the defense is on the field, Sarkisian is making offensive adjustments. He’s trusting his defensive coordinator to use timeouts correctly and basically be the head coach of that side of the ball. 

Sarkisian said that one of the reasons he replaced defensive coordinator Pete Kwiatkowski with Will Muschamp is because he was spending too much time in the defensive meetings and that kept him from focusing on the offense. The same goes for recruiting. Sarkisian isn’t the type of head coach who can spend two or three hours a day talking to recruits once the season starts because of his other responsibilities, namely game planning for the next opponent. 

The same is true at Rice where head coach Scott Abell is the offensive play-caller. He brought a unique option-style attack to South Main and handed the defensive keys to Jon Kay, who was a state championship head coach in high school at nearby Galena Park North Shore. 

Abell says the hardest years for a play-calling head coach is Year 1. The demands of building a staff, overhauling a roster, establishing relationships with university leaders and the fan base is enough to overload any coach’s plate. Adding the need to install a whole new scheme, especially one as unique as Abell’s, only adds to the time crunch. 

“For me, there is no other choice,” he said about remaining a play-caller as a head coach despite the demands on his time. “I love it. It’s one of the things that drives me every day when I wake up. How are we going to get better on that side of the football?” 

The great thing about coaching is there is no correct way. What worked for Carroll is not what worked for Nick Saban, but they’re arguably the best two college coaches of this century. The goal is to win, and no one cares how that is done. 

“I got hired to coach and I got hired to win football games,” SMU head coach and offensive play-caller Rhett Lashlee said. “So, if I think me calling plays is the best thing we can do to win them, I’ll keep doing it. And when I think that it’s better for someone else to do it, they will.”