Former Missouri Tigers football coach Woody Widenhofer dies at 77
Former Missouri head football coach Woody Widenhofer died Sunday at age 77.
Widenhofer coached the Tigers from 1985-88, with his teams compiling a 12-31-1 record. He later served as Vanderbilt’s head coach for five seasons.
He was living in Colorado Springs. Ryan Widenhofer, his son, told the Nashville Tennessean that his father had suffered a minor stroke earlier this month and while preparing for rehabilitation suffered a second, more severe stroke Saturday.
Widenhofer’s most successful era came as a defensive assistant coach for the Pittsburgh Steelers during their run of Super Bowl championships in the 1970s.
Widenhofer coached the linebackers there from 1973-78, a group that included Hall of Famers Jack Lambert and Jack Ham, along with former Missouri standout Andy Russell for part of the time.
Russell and Widenhofer were teammates at Missouri, where Widenhofer played linebacker under Dan Devine.
In 1979, Widenhofer became Pittsburgh’s defensive coordinator and the Steelers won the Super Bowl.
He parlayed his success as an NFL assistant coach into a head-coaching job with the Oklahoma Outlaws of the United States Football League, and in 1985 became Mizzou’s head coach to the fan slogan, “Hitch a Ride on Woody’s Wagon.”
Joe Castiglione was the Missouri assistant athletic director who oversaw marketing during the Widenhofer era and would accompany the coach to his weekly radio program on Sundays during the season in Jefferson City.
“He was ultra-competitive, but he had a heart of gold,” said Castiglione, the Oklahoma athletic director since 1999. “He treated everyone well.”
After five losing seasons at Vanderbilt, Widenhofer spent five seasons as a defensive coordinator at Southeastern Louisiana and New Mexico State. He retired in Florida and took on the unusual job of working at a toll booth in the Gulf Coast city of Destin.
“The primary reason I did it was to keep busy,” Widenhofer told The Star’s Vahe Gregorian in 2013. “This retirement deal is not as fun as you think it us.”
When he heard about Widenhofer’s part-time job, Castiglione said he wasn’t surprised.
“I thought about how much he like being around people, and chatting with people,” Castiglione said. “He was just being his gregarious self.”