Texas Coaching History

Texas football has seen 31 head coaches come and go, and all but 2 of them walked out of Austin with a winning record.

And even among those who finished with a losing record, their stints were not complete disasters. Charlie Strong, who coached the team from 2014-2016, finished with a Texas record of 16-21. Again, that’s the worst record in school history.

Texas’s coaching history is one of winners, plain and simple. The Longhorns are held to a high standard, which is why the Texas of the recent decade has been so disappointing. But things seem to be trending in the right direction under Steve Sarkisian, who has led the Longhorns to the College Football Playoff in consecutive seasons.

From R.D. Wentworth in 1894 to Sarkisian in 2024, let’s run through the coaching history for the Texas Longhorns football program.

Texas Coaching History

13 head coaches won a conference title at Texas, and 2 – Mack Brown and Darrell K Royal – won a national championship for the Longhorns. Royal and Brown, who will be discussed more further down the page, sit No. 1 and No. 2 in overall wins at Texas, too.

This stat is almost unbelievable: Texas did not record a losing season until 1933. That’s 38 straight years of winning seasons for the Longhorns, which first started playing in 1894. Clyde Littlefield – who left Austin with a 44-18-6 record – was fired for having the audacity to finish a year under .500.

And when it rains, it pours. After 38 straight winning seasons, the Longhorns would go on to record losing seasons in 4 of their next 5 campaigns. Dana Bible and Blair Cherry righted the ship, posting 15 straight winning seasons after the Longhorns’ skid.

Despite all this winning, Texas’s first national title had to wait until 1963, when Royal led the Longhorns to a perfect 11-0 season.

Darrell K Royal

The Longhorns of the 1960s and early 70s were elite to every extent of the word. Royal, who is now a member of the College Football Hall of Fame and the namesake for Texas’s stadium, won 3 titles – once in 1963, once again in 1969 and again the following season, 1970. Texas reached No. 1 in the AP poll across 5 consecutive years from 1961-1965. Obviously, Royal brought the Longhorns to No. 1 in 1969 and 1970 as well.

Royal’s 167 wins are the most in Texas history, and his win percentage of .774 is the best among Longhorns coaches to oversee at least 50 games. His 109-27-2 (.797) record in conference games was, somehow, even better.

If all that isn’t impressive enough, Royal finished his Texas career with 11 conference titles – which means he entered any given season with a 50% chance to win the conference championship.

Royal was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1983 and passed away on November 7, 2012.

Mack Brown

Mack Brown took a football team that underwhelmed in the 1990s and turned it, once again, into a consistent national title contender. Brown also presided over one of the greatest college football games of all time – Texas’s 41-38 victory over No. 1 USC at the 2005 Rose Bowl. That win gave Brown his first and only national title, as well as Texas’s 4th all-time.

Brown’s Longhorns won 10+ games across 9 straight seasons from 2001-2009. His first 3 seasons at Texas – the 3 years prior to the aforementioned run – each saw 9-win campaigns. In effect, that’s 12 straight years of excellent football that culminated in… 1 national title and 2 conference titles.

That last statistic became the catalyst for the eventual separation between the Longhorns and Brown following the 2013 season. Eventually, he couldn’t live up to the expectations that he set for the Longhorns.

Brown struggled against the top of the Big 12 – notably rival Oklahoma, which held a 9-7 record against Brown’s Longhorns by the time of his departure. The Sooners won 8 conference titles while Brown was head coach at Texas – which is just an unacceptable number for some around Austin.

Still, Brown goes down as one of the greatest coaches in Texas football history – no idle compliment. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2018.

Ethan Stone

Ethan Stone is a Tennessee graduate and loves all things college football and college basketball. Firm believer in fouling while up 3.