Missouri State's Casey Woods to make head coaching debut at Kyle Field

Key notes from Casey Woods interview

• I’m getting ready for these Texas Aggies. They look pretty good.
   
• There has never been a better time to be a Missouri State Bear than right now. That’s for football and our university. The city of Springfield is a great place, and it’s growing fast with over 500,000 residents in the greater Springfield area. All of those things are happening at the same time. It was a huge move for the football program last year, up from Division I-AA to I-A, and they had some immediate success by jumping into that bowl rank. When I first started looking for jobs and interviewing, this is one that stood out because nobody has done as well as you can here yet. We’ve had a fast nine months, and I can’t believe that it’s already here. I’m excited. It’ll be a lot of fun to test the culture we’re trying to present and the future we’ve got in mind here. I’m excited to test it against something like what Mike Elko has created. What an awesome challenge for our players and our staff.
   
• This is not the first time I’ve had to face Elko. I’ve been part of the staff a couple of times when we’ve had to face him, and this is a classic example of what an Elko-coached team is, which is physical, simple, smart, fast and great tacklers. They invest a lot in their defensive line to create havoc and play good defense. They have some scary things that they do on defense, especially on third downs. They’re a well-coached team on offense, and I know those guys do a great job. They run the ball. They take calculated shots. They do a good job of managing the clock. It’s a classic Elko team. You can see why they’re preseason top 10. You can see why he’s won 19 games the last two years. You can see why they went to the Playoff. The only two slip-ups they had last year were one-score games against top-10 teams. It’ll be a great challenge for us, and I’m excited for us to get down there and measure what it is, ultimately, where we want to go.
   
• I also think it’ll be a great experience for our fans. What I’m trying to sell here, and what we’re trying to get this community and student body to understand, is what a game day atmosphere can do for your university and community. The more we can learn from environments like this — and there’s not a finer one in college football than Kyle Field — is having a chance to teach our fan base what our expectations on our own scale are. We want to bring that SEC mentality back for what it can do for our entire community.
   
• Kevin Jennings is a great guy. Both he and Marcel Reed are guys who have been there and understand what it takes. They’ve been multi-year starters in a landscape where a celebrated starting quarterback will change jobs just because. They’ve stuck with it. I see similarities in their game, and they’re guys who can make all the throws you need to. They’re factors when the play comes to them, and they make things happen in those settings. At SMU, our offense lived and died by how Jennings was operating, and oftentimes, he played with great poise. You can see that in Reed’s game and why there was consistency in how they played on offense last year.
   
• I was proud of our staff, and they did a great job. I took the job the day Missouri State played in their bowl game. I started calling everybody on their roster to build those relationships. The staff built relationships in a short amount of time. I got to have a first impression right after the bowl game, or else I wouldn’t have met anyone on the team until Jan. 9, which would’ve been two weeks into the portal. SMU played well in its bowl game, which created some excitement about what we could do offensively. We hired somebody like defensive coordinator Jack Curtis, who is somebody who has a great resume. Hats off to our staff because they helped us retain over 70 guys from last year’s team or the signing class. In two weeks, we signed 28 transfers, and we’ll see a bunch of those guys on Saturday. I’m proud of them. We’ve hit the ground running. We got a huge ceiling here, and we think we can push this thing further than it ever has been here. We need to raise everyone’s level of understanding of what excellence looks like.
   
• I know Elko has two new coordinators and a bunch of different players, so you have to focus on the spirit and heart of what’s going to happen without knowing what play is going to get called. It’s a unique challenge for preparing for Week 1. I don’t know if we have time to ponder everything. We have the greatest product in the history of our sport, but there are so many problems that are solvable if we could just get together and do it as one group. While we’re doing it this way, you can remember during COVID when the guy you’ve never heard of was starting at left guard in Week 7. It’s kind of like that where you have no idea who is going to play. Yesterday, A&M announced a depth chart that was kind of like what we were expecting, but you have to focus on the spirit of what it is that you’re going to see. Focus on the things that will ultimately win games, and you can see what has won games for Elko at A&M and throughout his career. We want those same expectations for our team, to the point where it doesn’t matter who we play.
   
• Our offense is limited to concepts out of multiple pictures at tempo, and we’re going to try to attack every part of the field. The plays aren’t going to look the same as they did at SMU, but at the same time, I’m not sure they did when we won the National Championship in 2010 at Auburn, even if it’s the same spirit of the offense. We are an aggressive, downhill, physical football team. When you get into spread or tempo, the knock is that you lost some edge, toughness and physicality in space. We try very hard, and we’ve been successful, to maintain that physicality and aggressiveness while still giving our best players the opportunity to get the ball in space. That’s what you’ll see, and that’s what we’ll aim to do. We want to give as much multiplicity as we can to put strain on the guys calling the game and the guys trying to dissect what they’re looking at.
   
• I really like Skyler Locklear. This is his third stop after starting his career at Austin Peay. He started 19 games over the course of his career. He has started at places like DKR in Austin and Neyland in Knoxville. He has been in these environments. Our kids rally around him, and he has a level of confidence that is fun to watch. He’s a scrappy kind of player. He’s undersized compared to traditional quarterbacks, but his bravado is not. His confidence and ability to lead our team are not undersized. We’re not asking him to be Superman, but he is a natural playmaker in his own way with sneaky athleticism that shows up. He does not have to be a superhero for us to win games. We want him to be a great ball distributor and make sure that he plays within the scheme where he can. The plays will come to him, similar to Reed a little bit. You don’t have to seek those plays out. Take advantage when they do.
   
• I’m excited for our staff and players to play at Kyle Field. As a fan of college football, there is an appreciation for places that value football and places that put high value on what football can do for a community, a student body and the individual players. Kyle Field is always a great experience. I have a young staff, so it’ll be great for them to see what the best environments and most competitive teams look like. We can draw lessons from that. Make no mistake, we’re coming down there to win the game. We’re preparing to win and coaching to win. We’re challenging our team to be the best in order to have a chance to win the game. This is the first time in school history that Missouri State has played a regular-season game on ESPN, and that’s certainly a big step for our program and community. We’ve got to make sure all of that stuff comes together. It’s a great experience and a great lesson in what football can provide for a community. I’m happy for our players, and I’m excited to go against one of the best coaches in the country who has put together one of the best teams in the country in one of the finest places to watch football in the country. We have a chance to compete in that arena and have a chance to grade ourselves and set the course for how we want the rest of the season to look.