Steve Sarkisian is one of the few head coaches in major college football today who calls plays for his team, and Texas has enjoyed recent success under his unique role.
Since joining the coaching industry over two decades ago, the Longhorns head coach’s history as a quarterback coach and offensive coordinator has seen him call plays almost wherever he’s gone. He did so as headman at USC a decade ago and after spending time as an offensive coordinator in the NFL and at Alabama, Sarkisian didn’t give up play-calling duties after taking the job at Texas in 2021.
Heading into a brand new conference coming off a run to the College Football Playoffs, Sarkisian explained how he believes he can continue to endure the duties of both a head coach and of a de facto offensive coordinator at the same time.
“I think it’s sustainable,” Sarkisian told college football analyst and commentator Joel Klatt of his current role. “I think the thing for me, and I can’t speak for everybody else, is you try to hire really good people as best you can and people who are really competent and excel at what they do. And then you try to get them to understand the way we think, the way I think is the head coach, so that they can make some of the day-to-day operational decisions on different things. We can have a meeting, I can talk on these four or five things and then they can go handle those things.”
Of course, Sarkisian isn’t the only coach that handles this type of extended duty throughout the country. However, only Pete Carroll (2004) at USC, Steve Spurrier (1996) at Florida and Nebraska’s Tom Osborne (1994, 1995, 1997) are the three coaches to have handled both jobs and won national championships. Most importantly, no one has done it in the past two decades.
To help him, Sarkisian is leaning on his supporting staff to help cover all of his bases.
“I can still be kind of touching all those things, but entrusting them to make sure that it gets followed through with, and I think that was something that I was obviously extremely impressed with with Coach [Nick] Saban with what he did, Coach [Pete] Carroll. His ability to manage those things in the NFL, he was really the president of football operations with the Seahawks.
“And so, like I said, I just think I was fortunate to be around men that weren’t looking at life through a straw, right? I mean, those guys are very worldly. They’re very aware they’re very in tune in touch with what’s going on. And I see a lot of other coaches that look at this thing through a straw and they can’t see what’s going on around them, so I think it was trained really well and I was fortunate. Hopefully I can call plays for as long as I can, so as long as I can see that dang call sheet — my eyes, see I just turned 50 this year so my eyes, I don’t know how well I can see it.”
It remains to be seen if Sarkisian will be busting out the bifocals during Texas’ offensive drives this season, but if one thing is for sure — Longhorns fans have a lot to be excited about ahead of the 2024 college football season.
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