People You Need to Know: Casey Woods

Coming off a season in which Missouri State University’s Bears football team reached its first bowl game as a part of the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision, new head coach Casey Woods is walking the sidelines with high expectations. 

“We want to be great finishers in this program, and that’ll be a hallmark of what it is that we do. I would like to be competitive for our conference in November,” Woods says. “Hopefully it’s this year, but certainly here in the coming years, we’ll win our school’s first-ever bowl game at the Division I level.”

Woods was hired in December to become the 23rd head football coach in the program’s history, as the team finished up a winning campaign at 7-6, along with record season ticket sales in its inaugural year as a member of Conference USA. The program’s revenue surpassed $500,000 this past year, more than double the average amount of the past 10 years, according to Patrick Ransdell, MSU director of athletics. That revenue bump was boosted by the sale of 1,603 season tickets, exceeding the record total of 1,570 reached in 2007.

Building on a successful 2025 is a goal at MSU for Woods, who is being paid a first-year salary of $700,000, with annual increases boosting the amount to $850,000 by Jan. 1, 2030. A first-time head coach, Woods has spent the previous four seasons as offensive coordinator and football chief of staff at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He replaced Ryan Beard, who had coached the team since 2022 before taking a new head football coaching role at Conway, South Carolina-based Coastal Carolina University. 

It was full speed ahead on recruiting when Woods arrived on campus in January, he says. Noting the school has 28 new players coming to the team, the program was able to retain over 70 student-athletes on its roster of around 100. 

“We had to recruit early to make sure that we have a chance to win. Then we had to go bring visibility to this program within this state, within our recruiting footprint,” he says. “I thought we were able to create some initial impact on that, which was good. We saw 197 high schools and 66 junior colleges in about a week’s time there at the very end of January.”

Growing up the son of longtime football coach Sparky Woods, who joined the MSU staff in January as senior assistant coach, Woods says he knew at an early age coaching was a desired career path. 

“Being able to see the impact that I think my dad had on the players that he coached, he really had a life impact on them,” he says. “I don’t know that I could have articulated that when I was 22, but I think looking back, that’s for sure what really drew me into coaching, is the ability to have a positive impact on those people’s lives.”

Woods segued into coaching as a graduate assistant at his alma mater, the University of Tennessee, after his playing days as a wide receiver ended in 2007. His nearly 20-year coaching career has since included stops at University of Missouri-Columbia, University of Alabama at Birmingham and Auburn University. 

“I’ve been very fortunate in my career to be around a lot of winning, and so I do know what it looks like,” he says. “We want to do things that are intentional about winning. I try to be organized. I try to be enthusiastic. I try to be a great teacher when I can do that. And it’s a different phase of teaching now because I’m teaching a staff as opposed to teaching players all the time.”

Woods recently was able to move his wife, Lauren, and their five children – ranging in ages from 2-10 – to Springfield after living the past several years in Dallas. 

“I’m so excited to get them in the community and get started,” he says.

The football team currently utilizes a locker room in the Forsythe Athletics Center but plans to move into McDonald Arena possibly as soon as summer 2027, Woods says. The MSU Board of Governors voted last month to spend $1.4 million to hire Cannon Design Inc., based in Buffalo, New York with offices in St. Louis, to devise a plan to renovate the arena’s first-floor court and east wing for a locker room, weight room, equipment room and athletic training facility. 

While the football season’s kickoff is still several months away, Woods says the energy around the program is noticeable.

“There’s great momentum on campus and in the community, and our kids feel that, and I think the recruits feel that,” he says. “So, that’s a lot of fun to be part of.”