Morris Watts (1936-2026)

Longtime assistant coach Morris "Mo" Watts has died, the Watts family has informed FootballScoop.

Watts but the "life" in coaching lifer, devoting more than 50 years of his life to the game across high school, college and professional football. A 2015 profile of Watts while he was at Central Michigan credited him with 52 years in coaching at that time. He would coach one more season at CMU, one at Arkansas, and then one as Texas Southern's offensive coordinator before retiring for good in 2018.

In that profile, Watts credited his father with his driving work ethic. "He opened that gas station seven days a week for 33 years," he said at the time. "On Saturday nights everybody came to town to get their groceries and he'd stay open until midnight, 'til the last guy that he knew filled his tank and left town. And he opened at 6 o'clock every morning. He did that in case there was somebody coming through early."

A running back at Tulsa from 1958-60, Watts started coaching as an assistant at Seneca High School in Missouri in 1961, and would go on to work for 14 more teams across three levels of ball. Watts is most closely associated with Michigan State, where he was offensive coordinator from 1986-90, offensive coordinator again from 1992-94, and then offensive coordinator a third time from 1999-02, concluding his third and final run in East Lansing as the Spartans' interim head coach following Bobby Williams's midseason firing. 

Both the sons of gas station operators, Watts and Nick Saban ran parallel to each other for much of the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s. The pair were coordinators together at Michigan State from 1986-87, and then Watts's second tenure as the Spartans' OC ended when Saban returned as head coach in 1995. With Saban back in East Lansing, Watts was LSU's offensive coordinator from 1995-98, and then returned to Michigan State for Saban's final season with the Spartans before he then left for LSU. 

Watts initially retired after spending 2003 as Mississippi State's offensive coordinator, but returned to coaching as the offensive coordinator at Oklahoma's Broken Arrow High School, working for his college roommate Ron Lancaster. "I fished and hunted a lot," he said in the Central Michigan profile. "If I shot a deer that was exciting, but it wasn't as exciting as winning a big football game."

He would go on to coordinate the offense at Miami (Ohio), CMU and Texas Southern following his first retirement. Watts spent two seasons with the USFL's Birmingham Stallions and one with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in addition to college stints at Drake, Louisville, Indiana and Kansas, plus the aforementioned schools.

Please join the FootballScoop staff in praying for Watts family, his friends and colleagues, and the many, many, many players he coached across more than half a century in coaching.