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SEC coaches were miffed in May. The NCAA Playing Rules Oversight Panel had just imposed a rule limiting each team to 20 headsets for use on game day, with 15 of those going to coaches. That was an apparently oppressive regulation for some juggernaut programs.
First came Alabama's Nick Saban: "I don't know who is driving all this stuff, but to me it's kind of like mouse manure when you're up to your ears in elephant doo-doo." Then Auburn rival Gus Malzahn weighed in: "The 20-headset rule is a joke. There's no doubt about it. I think that's got the ability to hurt our game."
At this point, you're probably asking yourself a string of questions. Are 20 headsets really necessary? Who's on there? I can't have three people on a conference call without it going off the rails and folks talking over one another -- how could 20 barking college football coaches possibly communicate anything as the play clock winds down?
We posed those questions -- and many more -- to dozens of coaches, and they unanimously said chaos is a real factor. But there's a reason Saban and Malzahn were up in arms about the NCAA's new ear policing: Almost everyone we spoke with also said the headset is an essential, if train wreckish, part of every Saturday. Listen up ...
A headset's gotta have a code
"I don't care if you're the head coach or if you're a GA -- you got to learn headset etiquette," West Virginia's Dana Holgorsen says.
Headsetiquette lesson No. 1 involves strict discretion. Coaches talk bluntly about players and to one another in the heat of the moment, so headset wearers must swear that everything goes in the game-day vault.
Then-Arkansas coach Houston Nutt impressed that upon QB Dowell Loggains (now the Miami Dolphins' offensive coordinator) in the early 2000s when Loggains started listening in on game days as the Razorbacks' backup. "This is real ball now; the real truth's going to come out now," Nutt told Loggains. "So I don't want you going around the dinner table with the guys and sharing what Coach said about so-and-so having a bad backpedal technique."
The second headset commandment: No hurt feelings. Just listen to the most famous example from recent years, ex-Bama offensive coordinator and current FAU coach Lane Kiffin: "I learned from my last boss [Saban] to tell my staff prior to games, 'Hey, don't take anything personal or be too sensitive because things are going to get said really fast.' I had plenty of experience with that in my three years at Alabama -- taking all those ass-chewings reminded me to warn my coaches in advance."
Welcome to bleep central
In a 1989 game vs. UCLA at the Rose Bowl, then-Tennessee assistant David Cutcliffe remembers a Vols assistant arguing with head coach Johnny Majors on the headset, then accidentally muttering, "Could you get this son of a bitch away from me?"
"What son of a bitch?" Majors asked.
A quick-thinking fellow assistant in the booth, knowing which players unnerved Majors, butted in and swore his colleague was referring to one of the problem guys on the field. Luckily Majors accepted the explanation and moved on.
At Virginia Tech, legendary coach Frank Beamer's son, Shane, occasionally popped on his father's headphones while helping him patrol the sideline. But their dad-son bonding hit a speed bump after one game when Shane told his mom about the experience ... and freely passed along some of the more blue language he'd overheard. "You don't come home and tell your mother or anybody about it if you want to keep doing this job," Frank told him. Shane zipped his lips after that.
The bad words can flow so freely that some coaches have even installed PG-13-only rules. "You're not allowed to cuss on an offensive headset," says Syracuse's Dino Babers. "I just got tired of people cussing in my ear. You can say whatever you want. Stop screaming, and don't cuss at me."
Job insecurity
If you think the media are bad about speculating on hot seats, try listening in on game-day headsets. Most coaches admit they've gotten fired during a heated Saturday moment -- only for that firing to turn out not to be real.
As a grad assistant with Pitt in 1999, Joe Moorhead was canned over the radio multiple times by D-coordinator Larry Coyer after flubbing a personnel package. But not really. Moorhead rose from that position to eventually become Mississippi State's head coach. And now? Coyer works for Moorhead as an analyst in Starkville.
But the potential for screwups also brings the potential for promotion. See: Spurrier, Steve. In 1979, in his first game as QB coach under Pepper Rodgers at Georgia Tech, Spurrier was responsible for third-and-long playcalls. But against William & Mary, Tech trailed 7-6, and nothing was working -- especially the Young Ball Coach's plays.
"Spurrier, I thought you knew something about offense," Rodgers said over the headset.
"Coach, they play a big old soft cover 2, and we have to dump it off all the time," Spurrier replied. "If you let me call some first-down passes, we can hit some stuff."
Rodgers relented. Tech scored 27 unanswered points and won, and soon Spurrier was calling every play.
The cord era
Almost every veteran coach expressed great appreciation for technological advances in headset-ology. Shane Beamer spent his adolescence spooling headset cords on the Hokies' sideline, and when his dad took his off to ream out refs or a player, he always handed it to his son, who held it patiently (and definitely did not tell his mom what Dad said to the poor official).
In fact, the idea of tangled cords and rampaging coaches so daunted the younger Beamer that he would practice in the family garage before games, running around with an extension cord, plugging it in and out of outlets and trying not to be a trip hazard. "I still have nightmares about getting the cords tangled up with the chain crew on the sideline," he says.
That word "nightmare" comes up a lot with coaches, who tell tales of snapped wires, trips and falls, and other sideline mayhem. Our favorite from the pre-wireless era, from Wake Forest coach Dave Clawson: "You had times at the end of the game, you would have this incredible knot that there's no way in 100 years you could re-create. At first, you can go from the 30 to the 30, and by the end of the game you can only go 5 yards."
An expensive habit
Remember how Holgorsen said that headsetiquette is really important? Funny thing about that: Holgorsen confesses he's probably broken more than a dozen headsets in his coaching career. "I'm double digits, for sure," says the West Virginia coach, who's become infamous for slamming the gear into the ground during emotional moments, especially on controversial referee decisions.
That habit came to a head, though, after the 2015 season, when AD Shane Lyons told him each headset cost about $1,000. The two chuckled about it, but Lyons told the coach he'd have to pick up the broken-headsets tab going forward. Says Holgorsen now: "I've toned it down."
But even when they're not destroyed, the cost of gearing up 20 people with headsets is no joke. Most schools now employ at least one headset technician -- yes, that's a real thing -- who travels with the team on road trips and is responsible for making sure nothing goes haywire. And while Saban, Malzahn and many others argue strenuously about the importance of at least 20 people being plugged in together on game days, some coaches murmur that the whole headset habit has gotten a little silly, and they direct not-so-subtle blame toward Saban, a pioneer of the expanded coaching staff. "I think it's overkill, to tell you the truth," Spurrier says. "But what started all this is when people kept hiring all these analyst guys. So they're all up there with a headset on -- doing what, I don't know."
Stealing their thunder
If you're wondering whether weather ever affects football headsets, the answer is a resounding yes. Cutcliffe recalls a Tennessee -- Ole Miss game from 1988 when a severe thunderstorm threat had been issued for Oxford one afternoon. The game continued, but an official came into the visitors coaching booth, where the 34-year-old Cutcliffe sat with his colleagues.
"Just so y'all know," the official told the coaches, "your headsets are not grounded."
With lightning crackling all around Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, Cutcliffe and the other five coaches in the booth had a tough decision: Quit using the headsets, or risk getting struck by lightning. Wanna guess what they decided? "We've gotta coach," Cutcliffe recalls saying.
Tennessee found out later that Ole Miss' headsets had been grounded, but the Vols still managed to scurry out of town with a 20-12 win -- and zero electrocutions.
Additional reporting by Alex Scarborough