East Lansing — If it’s taking a little bit of time for Pat Fitzgerald to put his first-year Michigan State football staff together, it’s because some of his targets are a little busy during bowl season. But Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz announced that one of his coaches will be joining Fitzgerald next season.
LeVar Woods, a former Iowa and NFL linebacker who worked for Ferentz’s Iowa program since 2008, will join Fitzgerald’s MSU staff as a special teams coordinator after Iowa’s Dec. 31 appearance in the ReliaQuest Bowl against Vanderbilt.
Woods, 47, has been Iowa’s special teams coordinator since 2012 but also coached outside linebackers from 2012-14 and tight ends from 2015-17. And as he spoke to media Thursday, Woods was moved to tears announcing his departure from a program he says gave him more than football.
“There are definitely places that shape you, and there are places that make you,” Woods said. “And for me, Iowa is both. … The University of Iowa gave me more than football. It gave me my life.”
Michigan State is well aware of what Woods’ players can do. His nation-leading return man, Kaden Wetjen, all but won Iowa’s Nov. 23 game against Michigan State with 147 return yards including a 62-yard touchdown in the first quarter and a 40-yarder to set up the game-tying touchdown in the fourth. He also coached NFL cornerback Cooper DeJean as a return man and punter Tory Taylor to the program’s first Ray Guy Award in 2024. Wetjen became the first player ever to win the Big Ten’s Rodgers-Dwight Return Specialist of the Year Award twice.
Woods has been around Iowa longer than Ferentz. He had just finished his freshman year as a linebacker at Iowa when Ferentz took the Iowa job in December 1998 — a “good, veteran player” as Ferentz put it Thursday. Fitting for a special teams coach, Woods returned an 87-yard blocked field goal to notch Ferentz’s first career win against Northern Illinois, the only win that season.
“(Woods) was really a big part of helping try and build this thing when we got started,” Ferentz said. “Obviously a good player but more importantly a real leader, and a guy who helped set tempo and was just really responsive to the way we were doing things.”
Woods notched 165 tackles in his career and left as an honorable mention to the All-Big Ten team as a senior. From 2001 to 2007, Woods played for four NFL teams including the Detroit Lions. And when he retired from playing with 183 tackles across 88 game and 11 starts, Woods returned to Ferentz’s staff, where he was an administrative assistant from 2008 to 2011 before taking an active coaching role.
With his 206th career win over UMass on Sept. 13, Ferentz became the Big Ten’s all-time wins leader this season. With Ferentz now at 212 career wins, Woods has been a player or a coach for 149 of them.
Earlier Thursday, Michigan State officially announced a trio of assistant coaching hires: the returns of defensive coordinator Joe Rossi and safeties coach James Adams, as well as the hire of former MSU linebacker and two-time MSU captain Max Bullough as a co-defensive coordinator and linebackers coach. MSU also announced the addition of strength and conditioning coach Joel Welsh from Central Michigan.
In a social media post, Fitzgerald called Rossi, a former defensive lineman who previously coached at Minnesota and Rutgers, “one of the best defensive minds in the game.”
Considering Fitzgerald’s background as a neck-roll wearing linebacker in the late 1990s for Northwestern, it’s probably a little fitting that two of his first four official coaching hires are linebackers.
“You’re going to see a product on the field that’s going to play fast, tough, physical and with controlled aggression and emotion and passion for each other and for the game,” Fitzgerald said in his first media session on Dec. 2. “And it’s going to take a lot of work. That’s not going to be an overnight switch, but it’s definitely going to be some of the things that we’re going to reinforce.”
Current contract details for Woods and other coaches are not known, but Fitzgerald’s contract approved by the MSU Board of Trustees last Friday grants him $12.12 million to hire 10 assistants, including coordinators. He is limited to two-year contracts for his assistant coaches and three years for his coordinators.
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