Lamar football coach Mike Schultz has assembled his first staff less than a month into his hire as the Cardinals’ head football coach.
Schultz has named Troy Douglas and Melvin Smith co-defensive coordinators and Dan Dodd offensive coordinator. They will lead a staff that has not retained any of Ray Woodard’s assistants from this past season.
“I’m very excited about the staff that we have assembled,” Schultz said in a release. “I think we hit our expectation level for bringing in high-quality coaches. I feel very fortunate about the staff we have assembled. This staff has a great combination of maturity, experience, youth and energy.”
Douglas has spent most of his 30 years coaching in the Football Bowl Subdivision coaching defensive backs, recently at Pittsburgh. Among his many stops, he spent four years at SMU and two at UTEP.
Smith, a 33-year veteran, was defensive coordinator at Louisiana-Lafayette the past three years, helping the Ragin’ Cajuns reach the 2014 New Orleans and 2016 New Orleans bowls. He was a member of the 2013 Auburn staff that led the Tigers to the national championship game. That team organized the second-largest turnaround in college football history (eight more victories) and recorded 13 interceptions, 11 more than the previous season.
Smith has also logged SEC hours at Mississppi State, Texas A&M, Alabama and Ole Miss.
Dodd was tight ends coach and recruiting at Arkansas State, serving under Gus Malzahn, Bryan Harsin and Blake Anderson. The Red Wolves set school records for touchdowns and yards of total offense under Dodd and beat Central Florida 31-13 in the Cure Bowl on Dec. 17. Arkansas State won the Sun Belt Conference title five of the past six seasons.
Dodd has nearly 40 years of coaching experience. He was offensive coordinator at Western Illinois and has been a high school head coach.
Lamar also hired Brad Bedell to coach the offensive line, Kevin Brown for the receivers, Eric Buchanan for the running backs, Cam Clark for outside linebackers and strong safeties and Todd Ivicic to the defensive line.
Bedell is a former NFL player and All-American who coached the offensive line at Baylor this past season and worked with Schultz on the Texas State staff. Brown spent five seasons at UTSA as a tight ends coach and offensive coordinator. He also coached at TCU after serving as graduate assistant the past three years at Texas State.
Buchanan was special teams coordinator and defensive backs coach at Iowa Western Community College. Clark was most recently defensive coordinator at Faulkner University in Alabama was on Malzahn’s staffs at Arkansas State and Auburn as a defensive graduate assistant.
Ivicic has been on the staffs of Stephen F. Austin and Incarnate Word, spending four seasons at the latter as defensive and special teams coordinator, assistant head coach and interim head coach in 2011.
“We have guys who have a great deal of experience working at power-five schools, serving as coordinators and experience within the Southland Conference,” Schultz said.
“These guys have come in and hit the ground running,” Schultz said. “It’s exciting for any new coach to have his staff assembled. It was tough when I first got here because I was a one-man show, and I knew that would be the case at the very beginning, but it is full steam ahead now.”
Among members of Lamar’s 2016 coaching staff, Woodard has applied for the athletic director position in the Beaumont Independent School District, former offensive coordinator and offensive line coach Chuck Langston is now an assistant at Port Neches-Groves, and former defensive coordinator Trey Haverty has been hired as defensive quality control analyst at Texas.
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I.C. Murrell: 721-2435. Twitter: @ICMurrellPANews