Morris Watts, a longtime offensive coordinator for the Michigan State football team who coached three games as interim head coach in 2002, has died according to a university release. He was 88 years old.
Born in Seneca, Mo., Watts started his football career as a tailback for Tulsa from 1958 to 1960. When he graduated in 1961, he started a football coaching career that spanned 54 seasons at the high school, collegiate and professional levels.
Watts’ NCAA stops, mostly as an offensive coordinator or quarterbacks coach, spanned 10 different schools including Drake, Louisville, Indiana, Kansas, LSU, Michigan State and Mississippi State before a brief retirement from 2004-2007. Then Watt came back and coached at Miami (Ohio), Central Michigan, Arkansas and Texas Southern until he retired for good in 2018.
Watts served as Michigan State’s offensive coordinator in three stints — 1986-1990, 1992-1994 and 1999-2002 — for a collective 12 years in East Lansing. The first two stints came under George Perles, with Big Ten championships in 1987 and 1990 and four straight bowl games between them.
Though he left for the same position at LSU from 1995 to 1998, Watts came back to East Lansing run the offense for Nick Saban’s final MSU season in 1999, when his group averaged 31.5 points per game (the most since Kirk Gibson’s senior year in 1978) and finished in the AP top 10.
When Saban left for LSU, Watts stayed on under Bobby Williams and was nominated for the Broyles Award in 2001. After Williams was fired in the middle of the 2002 season, Watts served as interim coach and led MSU to a 1-2 record in the final three games of the season.
Watts’ 12 years at Michigan State were his most at any one school. He also coached quarterbacks at Central Michigan from 2011-2016, serving as offensive coordinator from 2014 onward. Central Michigan played in four bowl games, winning the 2012 Little Caesars Bowl at Ford Field.
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This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Morris Watts, longtime Michigan State OC under George Perles, dies at 88
Reporting by Connor Earegood, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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