Who Calls the Plays in the NFL?

Almost every play in an NFL game is chosen by a coach standing on the sideline, not by the players on the field. The quarterback you are watching is usually running someone else’s idea.

The short answer: coordinators, and sometimes the head coach

Each side of the ball has a coach whose job is to pick the plays.

On offense that is normally the offensive coordinator, unless the head coach came up as an offensive specialist, in which case he often keeps the job for himself. On defense it is nearly always the defensive coordinator. Special teams have their own coordinator too.

So on any given snap, one coach on one sideline has chosen what his team will try, and another coach on the opposite sideline has chosen how to stop it. The rest of the staff exists to get those two people ready to decide.

The coaching staff, from the top down

NFL coaching staffs are large, and the shape is consistent from club to club.

The head coach runs the whole operation: the game plan, the staff, the culture, the decisions nobody else can take. Under him sit the three coordinators, one for the offense, one for the defense, one for special teams. Under them sit the position coaches, each responsible for one group: quarterbacks, running backs, receivers, the offensive line, the defensive line, linebackers, defensive backs.

Head coaches almost all arrive from one side of the ball or the other, and they stay closest to that side. An offensive head coach will often call the offense himself and leave the defence to his coordinator. A defensive head coach usually does the reverse.

How the call reaches the field

Once a coach has chosen the play, it travels from the sideline to the huddle in seconds, and it does so by radio. This is not a convention or a piece of kit teams opted into. It is set out in the rulebook:

NFL rulebook, Rule 5, Section 3, Article 3 (Speakers in Helmets). The Coach-to-Player system allows a member of the coaching staff in the bench area or the coaches’ booth to communicate to a designated offensive or defensive player with a speaker in his helmet… Each offensive and defensive team is permitted no more than one player on the field with a speaker in his helmet.

One player per unit, and no more. On offense that is almost always the quarterback. On defence it is usually a linebacker, the man who has to organise everyone else before the snap.

You can tell who they are, because the rulebook makes them identifiable on purpose:

NFL rulebook, Rule 5, Section 3, Article 3. All players that have radio components in their helmet must have a decal, supplied by the League, displayed on the midline of the rear of the helmet.

That is the green dot. It is not a team decision or a sponsor’s sticker: the league supplies it and dictates where it goes, so officials and opponents can see at a glance who is wired. Teams also have to name those players in writing, on a Game Day Administration Report handed to the referee no later than an hour and a half before kickoff.

A few details in the same rule are worth having, because they explain things you will see and wonder about:

  • The communication is strictly one-way. The coach talks, the player listens, and there is no answering back.
  • The wired player does not have to take the snap. The rulebook says so explicitly, which is what makes some trick plays possible.
  • A club with a utility player, a receiver or running back who sometimes lines up at quarterback, must keep two helmets for him, one with radio components and one without.
  • On special teams, only one player per team is allowed a receiver on the field.

The fifteen-second cut-off

Here is the rule that shapes the rhythm of every single play, and almost nobody outside the sport knows it exists.

NFL rulebook, Rule 5, Section 3, Article 3. The communication begins once a game official has signaled a down to be over and is cut off when the play clock reaches 15 seconds or the ball is snapped, whichever occurs first.

The coach’s voice is switched off with fifteen seconds still on the play clock. Once it goes quiet, the player on the field is on his own.

That matters more than it sounds, because of how much time he has. The play clock is normally forty seconds from the end of the previous play, though it resets to twenty-five or thirty in certain situations, so for most of a game a quarterback gets roughly twenty-five seconds of coaching and then fifteen seconds of silence. In that silence he has to get everyone lined up, read what the defence is showing him, and change the call if what he is looking at will not work.

The league built it that way deliberately. It stops a coach effectively playing the game by remote control, and it means a loud crowd still counts for something: if the players cannot hear each other at the line, nobody on the sideline can rescue them.

When the radio fails

The radios fail. Batteries die, systems drop out, and it happens often enough that every team has a plan for it. The plan is gloriously low-tech, and, best of all, the rulebook expects it:

NFL rulebook, Rule 5, Section 3, Article 3. If the primary and backup players have been removed from the game, no other player may wear the radio speaker in his helmet. Teams must use other methods to communicate signals to their players.

“Other methods” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. In practice it means hand signals, laminated wristbands with the plays printed on them, and enormous boards held up on the sideline covered in random pictures. The player finds the agreed image and knows which play it means.

So this is a multi-billion-pound sport in which the officially sanctioned fallback position is a coach waving a poster of a cartoon and a traffic cone.

There is a layer of insurance before it comes to that. Each unit has a designated backup with a spare radio helmet, so if the primary man leaves the field or his battery goes, the green dot moves to him and he has to report to the official. It is only when both the primary and the backup are gone that the boards come out.

Does the head coach call the plays?

Sometimes, not always, and it is one of the most-argued questions in the sport.

Head coaches who built their careers on offense often keep the offensive play-calling, on the reasonable grounds that it is the thing they are best at. Others hand it to a coordinator and spend the game managing everything else: timeouts, challenges, fourth-down decisions, and the mood of fifty-three players.

Neither choice is right or wrong. A head coach who calls it himself has direct control of the thing that decides games, and a very full afternoon. A head coach who delegates trusts a specialist and keeps his own head up for the whole game.

It is also the first thing supporters shout about when a team is losing, in both directions: give it up, or take it back.

Common questions

Who calls the plays in the NFL?

Coaches, not players. On offense it is usually the offensive coordinator, or the head coach if he is an offensive specialist. On defense it is usually the defensive coordinator. The call goes by radio to one player per unit, the one wearing a green dot on the back of his helmet, who passes it on in the huddle.

What does an offensive coordinator do?

The offensive coordinator designs the offense and, on most teams, chooses the plays during the game. He works under the head coach and above the offensive position coaches, and he is responsible for how the team moves the ball and scores.

How does the quarterback know which play to run?

A coach on the sideline speaks it into a one-way radio in the quarterback’s helmet, the one marked with a green dot. The quarterback hears the call and repeats it in the huddle. The radio is cut off when the play clock reaches fifteen seconds, so after that he is on his own to read the defence and change the call if he needs to.

Does the head coach call the plays?

Some do, some do not. Head coaches with an offensive background often call the offense themselves. Others leave it to a coordinator so they can manage the rest of the game. Both are common, and teams switch between the two.

Where to go next

The Coach-to-Player system is Rule 5 of the official NFL rulebook, published by NFL Football Operations.