Casey Woods aims to grow MSU football program’s budget, fans, wins

Missouri State University’s new head football coach, Casey Woods, is in the middle of his get-to-know-you tour of Springfield.

“This is a town where you can make a life,” Woods told the crowd at Springfield Business Journal’s People You Need to Know event April 21. He said he and his family are settling in well.

Woods expressed his desire to support the community while developing growth potential for MSU’s football program.

“The football program has an opportunity to be the front porch of the university, first and foremost, right?” Woods said. “But eventually that’s going to lean on to being able to represent Springfield in the brightest way possible. And then you’ve got a chance to ultimately have that trickle-down impact on everybody involved.”

During the conversation with SBJ Executive Editor Christine Temple, Woods returned more than once to past statements by his boss, MSU Athletics Director Patrick Ransdell, that it’s never been a better time to be a Missouri State Bear.

According to past reporting, "Casey Woods checked every single box we were looking for," according to Ransdell. "There has never been a better time to get behind this program."

What does the program need to achieve Woods’ vision? Funding.

Woods, whose first-year MSU salary is $700,000, is part of the vast college sports economic system. Division I college football has become big business, Temple noted as she interviewed Woods on Tuesday, citing Wall Street Journal reporting that college football program valuations expanded 46% over last year. Some 15 college football programs are now valued at $1 billion or more, with Texas leading the pack at a valuation of $2.2 billion with almost $300 million in annual revenue.

“Our game’s never been healthier from that standpoint,” Woods replied. Still, college football coaches face a competitive landscape where they must “adapt or die,” Woods said.

“We definitely don’t have the time to sit back and say, well, we just did it like we used to do it, we’d be all right, that’s fine.”

MSU’s athletics budget was roughly $35 million at the time it joined Conference USA in mid-2025, according to past SBJ reporting. To meet goals such as improving MSU’s facilities like Plaster Stadium and McDonald Arena, as well as making more revenue available for name, image and likeness revenue-shares for college athletes, that budget must grow.

Woods wouldn’t name a specific goal for growing the football budget – “What the exact dollar figure is, I don’t know,” he said, but he offered a couple of dollar figures that give a glimpse of his thinking: a conservative estimate of $8 million to renovate McDonald Arena, with $25 million being his preferred budget “so we don’t screw it up.”

Speaking on McDonald Arena, Woods noted that he wanted to renovate it “the right way,” placing weight room, training room and equipment room facilities near each other and freeing up space in the Forsythe Athletics Center.

“They need the space, and they need the opportunity to do everything that they’re doing, so it’s actually good for our entire Athletics Department,” Woods said.

“I think that the facility is a standalone thing, right?” Woods said. “The facility is independent from what our budget ultimately needs to be.”

Woods also has a goal to grow the football program’s budget for revenue shares with student-athletes by roughly $1 million per year over the next five years.

A court settlement with NCAA last summer paved the way for revenue-sharing with college athletes for the first time. In the current school year, that’s capped at $20.5 million per school.

Revenue-sharing with student-athletes is a significant component in Woods’ strategy to develop Bears football: “That’s what an 18-year-old sees, or that’s what an experienced 21-year-old football player sees. You can put this $75,000 in my hand, that’s something tangible that I can react to.”

Woods said that from a football coach standpoint, there are three types of donors that can help advance the program: “senior society guys,” also known as “needle-movers,” with the resources to write multimillion-dollar checks to support the program and specific projects; corporate donors; and what Woods called “first down donors,” folks such as recent college graduates who are able to begin making donations, purchasing season tickets and the like.

Woods noted that recruitment has a key role in boosting the football program and embodying the dreams of the community, and his intention is to improve the “acquisition phase” of athletic recruitment by getting the word out throughout Missouri: “By May 4,” Woods said, “we are going to have set foot, I mean boots on the ground, in all 419 football-playing schools in the state.”

Woods said that high school recruiting differs from relationships with athletes already recruited who could benefit from revenue-sharing: “The way that we’re going to build and sustain the culture is going to be through our facilities, and how we pull people into there, and develop as we get into the retention phase.”

In terms of athletes already recruited for MSU football, Woods said he hadn’t yet chosen a starting quarterback for the upcoming season but had narrowed it down to two athletes for the role.

“I think we’ve got two fabulous quarterbacks,” Woods said, referencing Henry Belin IV, who previously played at Duke University, and Skyler Locklear, who previously played at University of Texas at El Paso. “We brought in two guys that are seniors that have played. We’re convinced both of them can contribute to helping us win the games. Ultimately, which one decides to take the first snap and all that, I think that still has to play out for the course of summer.”

Four promises
Woods detailed four promises he’s made in his new role:

• Win the first Division I championship in MSU history

• Improve recruitment: “We’re going to recruit this place better than it’s ever been recruited before.”

• Turn Plaster Stadium into a memorable experience (turning football program space at the facility into “club-level C” space, in a bid to appeal to corporate sponsors)

• Make an impact

“I’m an all in guy,” Woods said, noting that the breadth of day-to-day responsibilities for a head coach is similar to the challenges faced by business leaders: “I do have to differentiate between what decisions I need to make right now. I have to prioritize the things that are going on. I have to delegate more than I’ve ever had to delegate in my entire life and make sure that everybody’s pulling in the same direction.”

Family and community
“It’s been an awesome transition,” Woods said, noting he and his wife, Lauren, and their five children have been in their new Springfield house for about three weeks. “We are glad to be here, glad to be part of this community. And I grew up in college towns a little bit. I’m a coach’s kid, and it’s been a fun transition.”

Woods tallied up a list of just a few of his recent speaking engagements as he makes the rounds in his new home community: a Friday-night church fundraiser, a talk for doctors at Mercy, joining up with other community conversations that aren’t “all sports-driven.”

“I hit my fourth Rotary Club this morning,” Woods noted.

Community support is a key highlight of Woods’ vision for MSU’s football program, its effect on the university and the community at large. Woods said he’s “counting on” the Springfield community for his young family – and for the 15 coaches and their families that he’s brought into the football program.

That promise goes both ways: “I think that this community is counting on us and our staff and our team to represent this community as best we possibly can,” Woods said. “And let’s push it forward and push it higher than it’s ever been. We got a little bit of momentum. We got the super high ceiling. We’ve got a chance to make the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time.”

Hiring dad
“The coolest thing I’ve ever gotten to do is hire my dad,” Woods said.

Sparky Woods – hired in January as senior assistant coach for the football Bears – has been coaching for more time than his son Casey has been alive. He’ll have his 50th fall camp coming up in August, Woods said.

The elder Woods was a head football coach for 17 years, including five in the Southeastern Conference, commonly known as the SEC, Woods said. He was head coach at Appalachian State University, University of South Carolina and Virginia Military Institute, according to his Missouri State University biography. Most recently, the elder Woods was senior adviser to the head coach of the University of North Carolina from 2019 to 2023.

Woods noted that his dad has a huge effect on his own character, his coaching and his staff and team: “He can pour not only into me, but into our coaching staff, into our players, and he’s just a great resource at every step along the way.”

Woods added, “Now that I know why I want to coach, it all has to do with him, and it was the impact that he had on guys in that age group and that demographic that I live. I coach a demographic where probably 60%-70% of guys wouldn’t go to college without football … I do think watching how he cares, how he led, the things he believed in, certainly set the tone for that.”

By way of sharing his character, Woods listed a series of core values that drive him: salvation – he is a committed Christian – along with loyalty, toughness, hard work and impact.

“I was always impact-driven,” Woods said. “And I thought that, man, the bigger platform that God gave me, to have an opportunity to pour into; first, young men, right, the players that we have at our level, to have their last stop before they enter the real world is certainly a tremendous opportunity.”